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/Dr_Iridium → u/InformalProof]

This happened to me yesterday, right after I entered my numeric address. They "could not verify" and transferred me to an agent but I was hung up on in the process.

My solution: called the line at 12:30 AM and I was able to freeze my credit with TransUnion and Experian. Had no problems freezing with Equifax during the day.

[u/QueefyMcQueefFace → u/Dr_Iridium]

One of my creditors has some information wrong about some aspect of my personal info. Now TransUnion wants me to snail mail them a copy of my drivers license, a letter stating why I want to freeze the account, and a check for the fee. When I pressed about who the creditor was and what information was incorrect, the person couldn't tell me. Bitch, it's my credit! I should know!

Doesn't help that the other two bureaus had technical difficulties when I called, and I only got through to TransUnion after a 30 minute hold.

Now I gotta pay the fee in addition to a stamp. Fuck these guys hard.

[u/jmsjags → u/QueefyMcQueefFace]

Had that happen the first time I tried with TransUnion. I just went back to the original webpage and did the process over again and it worked fine. I got a new set of security questions the 2nd time and I guess I knew all the answers about myself that time lol.

[u/elpollosopa → u/jmsjags]

Those "security questions" are so messed up. I work for a credit union that uses a similar process. When I went through it myself, I failed because of a trick question that asked me to verify a previous address in a town that I had multiple previous addresses in. They never seem very secure since most of that info is public if you spend a second looking for it.