Oh, I just noticed in small print the following: “Services provided by Experian® Partner Solutions.” It looks like Costco simply partnered up with Experian…
Capital One has been great about fraud stuff, but so has my local bank.
Has anyone with kids in college put freezes on their students accounts? Do they use their home address for verification or school address? wondering if they will be unable to verify if they think you are putting in the “wrong” address. Do the bureaus track things like dorm addresses when a student still has a DL in their home state? Hope this question makes sense.
@cellomom2 - they will ask a couple of security questions in the verify sections. It also ask you if you have lived at the present address for 2 years. My home and mailing address are different and I used my mailing address. The security questions were about my home address. All my kids have credit cards or bank accounts tha have our home address and also accounts that they use there post college address. Two of them had no problem placing a fraud alert. My other kid had an issue but it was because he couldn’t remember some details about his car loan.
I am reluctant to request for credit freezing. I don’t want to give more info to Equifax or hackers.
Who is going to use Equifax for credit check now? Are their credit reports reliable?
Banks should be more careful when approving new credit cards or loans.
And imagine 143 million people request for credit check freezing.
Baby kid soooo lucked out. Her card with a low limit has been approved and mailed to a (random) address - our new home address. Kid rents in the city. We live in the boonies. 
Now she can freeze until hell freezes over.
I have received weird password attempt notices from Facebook and Indeed in the last week. Guess I will be doing more password changing to all my accounts to make sure they are “fresh”. Problem is, truly random passwords are SO hard to keep track of.
^I have a book. If I lose that, I’m screwed.
I just password protected my laptop. It just never seemed necessary I don’t use it in public; it’s always home, but then I just had nightmares of someone breaking in, stealing it, and getting into saved logins (I don’t save any cc card or bank ones, but email… )
Obviously I’ve been lax!
They could make freezing the default. Everyone is frozen and unlock when they need.
A bit off topic; Do you turn off your wifi when not in use? My printer starts randomly. I wonder it’s realtaed to hacking of my IP address.
You could get a password manager. These generate long, random passwords for every site and store them on your computer in encrypted form. Then you only need one password to unlock access to all your passwords, and since that password isn’t stored anywhere on the internet it can’t be hacked.
I don’t. It’s almost always in use anyway. (DW works from home) My wireless printer never started randomly printing though. What is yours printing?
Random letters and symbols. Just one line or two on each page wasting any paper left on the printer.
I think it’s time for opt-in public/private key security on credit checks which verify with the individual directly. The horse has well and truly left the barn - our SSNs, birthdays, and other PII is now essentially public domain and will remain so forever. We can no longer continue using SSN as a secret personal code. The federal government must come up with some other method.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/14/pf/equifax-freeze-my-credit/index.html
Reporter discusses her experience trying to freeze accounts, and fraud alerts, too ! It doesn’t go so well
Probably a problem with the printer driver. Have you tried uninstalling/reinstalling the printer software or updating the driver?
DH just signed up for credit freeze with Experian and didn’t get charged for it. Can’t get through at TU and Equifax.
Is TU Credit Lock as good as a freeze?
Is it still worth it to sign up for Equifax’s credit monitoring if you’ve put a freeze on your credit?
Basically 1/2 the entire US population is trying to freeze their accounts, nobody should be surprised that servers are swamped. What does surprise me is that congress is taking so long to act. I would’ve thought by now they would’ve passed an emergency measure requiring Equifax pay for everybody’s credit freeze. Something roughly analogous to the BP Deepwater Horizon measures.
If you think about it, 150 million people paying an average of $20 each to freeze their credit not even counting unfreezing costs. That’s a $3B hit to households. Taxpaying and voting households. IMHO Equifax should be forced to set up a single portal to freeze across all 5 agencies (credit alerts work like that across the 3 major agencies) while paying 100% of the cost.
From equifax site :
Would it be possible for the hackers to thaw our account after we freeze it?
Who knows! It will depend on how well the bureaus safeguard those pins and the unlock mechanisms.