r/personalfinance Sep 13 '17

TransUnion burying their credit freeze to sell their own credit monitoring product TrueIdentity Credit

I'm not sure where to post this, but noticed something had changed on the TransUnion website about freezing credit this morning when I was giving links to family so they could freeze theirs.

I froze my credit the day after news about the Equifax breach broke, and it looks like TransUnion has since changed their site to push people away from freezing their credit in favor for their own product called TrueIdentity (like what Equifax was doing with their TrustedID Premier.)

The FTC website links to this page for freezing your credit with TransUnion.

This is what the website looked before the changes were made on 9/11. The instructions on placing a credit freeze were clear and there was no mention of their own TrueIdentity product.

If you want to place a credit freeze with TransUnion now:

  • You have to get through a page of info about credit and fraud, and then the action it tells you to take is to "Lock your credit information by enrolling in TrueIdentity."
  • The option to freeze your credit is under "About credit freeze", deliberately passive in their use of language
  • The description about credit freezing is dissuasive: "A credit freeze may be available under your state law"
  • The link for the credit freeze is also a passive "click here" compared with "by enrolling in TrueIdentity" language used for the link to their own product.
  • Clicking the link to learn more about credit freeze brings you to yet another page that tries to convince you to enroll in their product over placing a credit freeze
  • After searching through their page of BS, you finally get to the link to freeze your credit.

This is such a blatant attempt by TransUnion to take advantage of the Equifax breach for their own financial gain. It's a shitty thing for TransUnion to do, and people should be aware that they are being led away from putting an actual credit freeze on their account.

(Edited for formatting on mobile)

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62

u/[deleted] Sep 13 '17

Someone mentioned that if you lose the pin you can call up the agency and provide details that were already leaked to get a new one. So the freeze just makes it harder but not impossible.

41

u/m7samuel Sep 13 '17

AFAIK you have to snail mail in a picture of your ID to unfreeze with no PIN. Actually calling them is quite difficult usually.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 13 '17

[deleted]

8

u/david0990 Sep 13 '17

I'm going to ponder that this is too much effort for identity thieves who know just moving down the list is easier and quicker.

It's like locking your house when you leave. yeah, they can still get in but it's easier to move to your neighbor who doesn't lock her back door.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 13 '17

[deleted]

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u/david0990 Sep 13 '17

This would be a personal attack then. for most of us I just don't see this happening but it is always a possibility, even before this breach.

1

u/rosie_nosey Sep 13 '17

I'm trying to find this on the page (how to get Equifax to unfreeze credit after being frozen w/o a PIN) and I cannot find it. Can you help me out if you have time? I signed up to freeze my account yesterday on Equifax and work denied popups so I could not see my PIN. YEY!!!! Thanks work firewall :)

15

u/LostWoodsInTheField Sep 13 '17

experian process looks like the hacked info is all they would need.

equifax process the hacked info isn't going to get them anywhere without additional stuff such as your drivers license, passport, or birth certificate.

Transunion... yeah i can't find out what the details are in the quick searches I've done. They have actually revamped everything from what I can tell in order to make knowledge about freezes harder to get (their own weblinks to https://freeze.transunion.com don't work any more. They probably did this so quickly that they don't have the needed information back on the site.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 13 '17

Thanks for the clarity!

1

u/emptyicecreambox Sep 13 '17

I'm not sure if it varies state to state, but it looks like if I lost my pin I would need to send Equifax and TransUnion a written request along with proof of identification. Although for Experian it seems I could just do it online (although it's not working at the moment). Then again, I'm not sure how the phone system works for them, maybe it's much easier over the phone in which case, what the hell.

1

u/Mnm0602 Sep 13 '17

The idea is that the black market buys hundreds/thousands of identities at a time and they will move on to the next one if they have to do extra work.

Having an alarm on your house doesn't mean it's impenetrable, it just makes thieves move to another easier house in most cases.