Freezing my credit scores, heard there's 4, worth the trouble freezing them all?

Small rant: Perhaps I'm getting old and cynical, but the entire process through their sites feels a lil sketchy lol

Sure, it requires the basics, along with your SSN and cellphone to receive a text confirmation. Can't just be me, right?

Anyways, thanks for answering my crazy questions due to my lack of faith in the safety of the internet in the days of SEO's. 🤣

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I froze three and was given a code to unlock them temporarily (or something this was like 8 years ago).
Gave the code to my bank when applying for a home loan. It didn’t work. Ended up just unfreezing so they could do their job.
Costs like $12 every time you want to freeze. It’s a racket.
- You got scammed by one of the credit bureau's dark patterns to buy a service you don't need. It shouldn't cost any money to freeze/unfreeze your credit. You can do it online with each of them for free.
- Which one required money to unfreeze? Because that definitely sounds sketchy.
  
  It wasn’t money to unfreeze. It was money to re-freeze after.
  
  You shouldn't have had to pay anything. I just put a "thaw" on mine two nights ago, which is a temporary unfreeze, and it was free with all three bureaus.
  
  Yeah the temporary unfreeze was what wasn’t working and it was holding up my credit union.
  
  Don't schedule a thaw. Just do it all manually: unfreeze, apply, and then freeze again.
  
  That’s what I eventually did. Except without the refreeze because it was going to cost me $12 which while a small amount, is definitely a ripoff.
  
  That can't be right because credit-freezing must be free by law. You can do it an infinite amount of times for free. I think the website may be misleading you into a different thing (it's either Experian or Equifax that is grotesquely adept at trying to get its customers to pay). Which bureau is it? I could try to get you the correct URL. Some of them really try to hide it. It's such a disgusting practice.
  
  I’m sure there was a better way to do it. This was 7-8 years ago, so I don’t remember the details.
  I think I was in a hurry to do it after I found out someone made purchases with a Google pay account I forgot I had.
  
  Oh, it wasn't recent. Yeah, their site designs definitely don't take well to users on a time limit. Anyway, the best practice now with all the rampant identity theft going on is to always keep them frozen and only unfreeze them temporarily when you apply for anything credit-involving until the application is reviewed.

36 comments