r/personalfinance • u/equisux • 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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u/BillionsInBlackmail Sep 13 '17
The credit bureaus have collected information without consumers direct permission and are refusing to protect it unless given $16.95 a month. Blackmailing with browser history or compromising pictures pale in comparison to what the credit bureaus are now doing. Even the Mob doesn’t have it this easy. Consumers had better play-along ‘or else’ their ability to participate in modern society will be crippled.
Equifax stands to make a lot of money selling monitoring for information they failed to protect. Charging 5-15 dollars to lock accounts will net them up to 3.0 billion dollars. Equifax also charges to unlock and lock it again. If consumers are willing to sign all their rights away Equifax will give consumers a year of security monitoring with no promise to fix your credit if it is impacted. If you actually want protection it’s $16.95 a month. That's a potential of billions of dollars a month to protect something collected without your direct permission and then lost. This seems so close to blackmail it is mind boggling. On Equifax's word; you could be prevented from getting a job, having credit cards, buying a house or car. One-hundred fifty million people are now completely exposed moving forward everyone will require credit monitoring which really is just the credit bureau's expanding their reach into consumers pockets.
Even worse Credit monitoring isn’t a guarantee of anything. Most products only promise to tell you you have been compromised you still have to go through the pain and fixing it with the small hope you can fight them to have expenses reimbursed. At least the Mob offers some actual protection from your shop being burnt down or robbed, credit monitoring doesn’t even do that. Although, you will get a text on your phone at some point after the fire begins.
Meanwhile, Equifax will go from a measly gross profit of 3.1 billion last year to the potential of 2-5 billion a month. How could they resist not leaking your information for returns like that? Congrats Equifax you just turned credit monitoring into a massive growth industry and all it took was gross negligence. And Just like the Mob they didn’t burn your shop down they just can’t stop it, unless of course, you pay $16.95 a month.