Charles Schwab is my broker for my non-retirement portfolios and I periodically get emails from them with articles about financial topics. This month they had an article I thought I’d share about freezing your credit because it’s something extremely important in this day and age given all the data breaches in the news. In particular, there was one data breach that revealed critical data for most Americans that any scammer would need to steal your identity.
I decided to write this post because there’s no concise way to explain the nuances of what’s being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it’s easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through an act of unauthorised access and publish a discrete corpus of information that can be attributed back to that source. But in the case of National Public Data, we’re talking about a data aggregator most people had never heard of where a “threat actor” has published various partial sets of data with no clear way to attribute it back to the source. And they’re already the subject of a class action, to add yet another variable into the mix. I’ve been collating information related to this incident over the last couple of months, so let me talk about what’s known about the incident, what data is circulating and what remains a bit of a mystery.
https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-3-billion-people-national-public-data-breach/
Freezing your credit is one of the best ways to protect against identity theft. When your credit is frozen, lenders can’t access your credit report, which prevents thieves from opening new accounts in your name.
Positives on freezing your credit
- It doesn’t hurt your credit score.
- It’s free to do with Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
- You can temporarily lift the freeze if you need new credit.
Negatives on freezing your credit
- It’s cumbersome to open new credit accounts
That’s the only negative I see.
I froze my credit with all three credit reporting agencies back in 2017. During that time I’ve only had to lift the freeze twice. It used to be difficult to lift the freeze because the credit agencies would rather have your credit open for ease of use. When I did mine back in 2017 the agencies sent you a letter with a PIN. If you lost that PIN it was very difficult to lift the freeze. Now because of a change in federal law all three credit reporting agencies are required to make it free and easy to freeze your credit AND lift that freeze. It’s all done online.
If you haven’t created an account at at all three credit reporting agencies do so right now. Don’t wait. Ignore their sales pitches. You don’t need to pay for anything to do this. Here are the links to their sites.
Once you’ve created your account and are logged in navigate to the section of their site to freeze your credit. Here are the links.
With data breaches on the rise, freezing your credit is a simple step that can prevent major problems later.
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