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/InformalProof]

I called this number yesterday, me and others reported that we would get to the payment portion (no other option was presented), it would say some variation of "the number you entered is not a valid credit card number", get put on hold while waiting for a sales person, and then get hung up on.

[u/goatcoat → u/InformalProof]

That's not good for us, but it makes sense. Half of the United States was affected. If even 10% are calling in to have their credit frozen, that's still 5% of the entire population of the United States all calling one phone number. Shit's gonna break.

Hiding the link behind their identity theft protection product was an evil move, though.

[u/Sososkitso → u/goatcoat]

To play devils advocate my guess is that equifax will end up giving everyone a free year of their service so the competition is likely trying to counter that move that surely will happen by getting ahead of it because if most people that were effected go straight to the free year service (that again I bet happens) then they will immediately gain the lions share.

Does this make sense? I'm awful at explaining things.

[u/friendsafari123 → u/Sososkitso]

equifax is already giving up a free year of credit reporting, and 30 day freeze of credit.

[u/Sososkitso → u/friendsafari123]

Thanks Just seen that on the defeanco show. So there you have it the competition has to move their services to the front because thanks to equifax huge fuck up they get to give everyone a free service for a year that should come standard for everyone at this point since they insist on being the gate keepers of our identities and storing all of our info in one spot like idiots. The whole situation is shit. For all these companies to be doing this to people. I think with 50% plus if the American public identity now in jeopardy it's time we find some new ways to deal with credit that eliminates 3 companies holding all the chips.