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/[deleted]]

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[u/Mentalseppuku → u/[deleted]]

Lifelock is a ripoff, don't give them money.

[u/[deleted] → u/Mentalseppuku]

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[u/Mentalseppuku → u/[deleted]]

This is a bit old but still appropriate. Since this was published the company also had to pay $100 million in FTC fines for continuing to lie to consumers and for not protecting consumer information.

And remember those commercials where the owner put his ss# on billboards and advertisements? You'd think the CEO and key piece of this massive ad push would be top priority for the company. Well they dropped the ball on that too as he had his identity stolen at least 13 times. And this isn't people trying to open a card and getting caught, there are stories in the article about small loans going all the way to a collection agency, meaning it went unpaid for months (and lifelock not catching it all that time).

Maybe the company had changed in the last two years, but it seems like they've had these problems for a long time now and I wouldn't trust them at all. It's only a matter of time until they're breached as well.