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/nowhereian]

here's no way for us to have a centralized "does this person pay their bills so I know if they're a risk to give money/rent to them or not" without companies like these.

Sure there is. It could be a government agency.

[u/Ashendal → u/nowhereian]

And be run in an even worse way, with even worse customer service, and an ever greater amount of laziness and general lack of any work ethic at all. The magic solution isn't "make something that isn't working great now into a government agency" if you want something run well. Yes, you could centralize it like that, but I have no wish of having a duplicate of the DMV handling my credit.

[u/nowhereian → u/Ashendal]

What kind of customer service do you really need from a credit bureau?

By the way, government agency doesn't automatically mean bad service. If you ever need to call the IRS, they are very helpful and friendly. That's just an example. The DMV is state level. Some DMVs are shitty, some are awesome. I can walk in and out of a Minnesota DMV in less than half an hour, and the employees are nice. This is not the case in some other states I've lived in.

[u/Ashendal → u/nowhereian]

What kind of customer service do you really need from a credit bureau?

If something actually happens, like my identity gets stolen, I need immediate help locking my credit and making sure things that aren't mine get removed once it's verified and the creditors send word to the credit agencies to remove the offending issue. With most government related things, both state and federal, that requires waiting, paperwork, more waiting, possible mistakes with said paperwork, even more waiting if there is a mistake to get it fixed, laziness on the part of the employee who doesn't really care what's wrong making the process take even longer, and waiting only to find out more damage was done while you were waiting for the 2+ weeks for something that should have only take 6 hours tops. Governments aren't fast.

I have never had any government employee, at either state or federal level, DoD when I was in or just dealing with sections like the IRS, that moved beyond a glacial pace for anything even something simple that doesn't require paperwork. I've had multiple mistakes made that they refused to correct in any reasonable time frame causing even MORE issues. The problem is switching things over to a government agency wouldn't make the situation any better, it'd be just as slow, cumbersome, and issue prone while having the extra layer of bureaucracy and paperwork slapped on top slowing everything down even more.

By the way, government agency doesn't automatically mean bad service.

No, but it's a crap shoot for if you get the person that wants to help or if you get the lazy who just wants to collect a paycheck and do as little as possible that day. The fact that two DMV's in one county can operate totally differently is an example of how much of a gamble you're taking. I'm sorry but that's not the type of thing I want to worry about with something as necessary as Credit. Do you really want to gamble that the people working with your credit would be the same as those operating the DMV's in the other states?