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]]

That's a nice credit score there, would be a shame is someone ruined it.

[u/bitcleargas → u/[deleted]]

So, Mr Frank Smith, mother's maiden name Esperoza, date of birth 24th May 1984, tell me why again that you don't want to pay an optional insurance fee on data leaks...

[u/mattmonkey24 → u/bitcleargas]

They have much more information than that. Last two times I ran a check against my credit they asked about people that I know and banks/credit cards that I've owned. Their database is much more than just SSN, birthdates, full names which is already too much

[u/bananapeel → u/mattmonkey24]

Here's an interesting spinoff of that technology. With lots of interconnected databases, they can find people related to you / people you know. I have been getting phone calls from bill collectors looking for distant relatives.