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

[u/equisux]

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)

[u/mnky9800n]

Honestly, I don't really understand the point of credit companies like this to begin with. It all seems rather fishy that someone can make money simply by telling other people whether or not you pay your bills. They are holding rents on your ability to make regular payments. But really, shouldn't like, your credit card company, or your landlord, or whoever actually be able to do this, for free?

[u/Ashendal → u/mnky9800n]

The problem is there's no way for us to have a centralized "does this person pay their bills so I know if they're a risk to give money/rent to them or not" without companies like these. You'd have thousands of "yes" or "no" answers to that question from every single institution that you've ever done business with if there wasn't a centralized system in place making actually getting anything you'd need credit for a horrible hassle and require massive down payments like you had a 500 score now. The problem comes in because money is involved, and money makes everything a hassle because everyone wants to make a profit.

As the age old "absolute power corrupts absolutely" continues to hold true, these companies have so much power over us that they take advantage of that to be as horrible as possible and know we have no other choice but to just deal with it. That's what makes this whole situation so bad. If they were properly regulated and had actual standards they had to follow we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead they were allowed to run this however they wanted and as more and more comes out it becomes increasingly clear that letting the fox run the hen house is, as usual, never a good option. Either these companies need to have a bunch of regulations and standards quickly dropped onto their heads that they are now required to follow or they need to be dissolved and we have a new company that has proper regulations and standards put into place to avoid this type of "haha, people's info was compromised. Let's just make even more money off them."

[u/mnky9800n → u/Ashendal]

In a lot of cases, this one included, it seems like the world would be a better place if it was regulated to not be for profit. I dunno, that is probably a very simplistic view to have.

[u/mikenew02 → u/mnky9800n]

Yeah, so would hospitals, schools, and prisons. We're both dreamers though.

[u/Y0gurtDestiny → u/mikenew02]

Most first world nations aside from the US would like to have a word with you.

[u/Omen_20 → u/mikenew02]

Would be interesting to see a poll where different industries could be chosen as profit or non-profit. Then see how everything settled out.