Equifax Is Now Allowing Free Credit Freezes Until June 30th

Update 02/06/18: This free freeze offering has been extended until June 30th, 2018. Hat tip to DDG

Equifax is involved in a data breach that may have compromised the data of up to 143 million consumers. One of the things that some people have been suggesting as a response to this data breach is to freeze your credit reports, the problem with this is that there is a fee for doing so. The fees vary by state and in response to consumer feedback Equifax are waiving their fees for the next 30 days (until November 21st). This means you need to initiate the freeze before then for it to be free, it will continue to be frozen until you unfreeze it.

The problem with this is that a consumer would actually need to also place a freeze on their Experian & TransUnion reports and that won’t be free. It’s up to each individual to decide whether freezing reports makes sense or not, we’ve provided our suggestions on what you should/shouldn’t do here.
    William Charles
  • On February 6, 2018, 16:58

View Comments (57)

  • Just a heads up, Congress passed a bill that will(across the board) not allow CBRs to charge fees for adding/removing credit freezes. Mr.Goldilocks does need to sign the bill once it gets on his desk and then in 4 months, it "should" be put into action.

  • How generous! The thing is, those who had their data compromised wouldn't get any protection from freezing because the hackers use this data at least a year or two out from any breach. So Equifax has decided to cash in on their negligence, offering us these useless freezes that'll make them money when people have to unfreeze, and does nothing to protect us in the short term.

    Don't even get me started on the checker tool they released just afterwards, that told you that yes your data may have been compromised, in exchange for you giving up the right to sue.

  • Thank you US Congress. As a self respecting American I will bend for you everytime and let you have your way with me as long as you let me pick on some XYZ class of people and blame them for all that's wrong with my life.

    Ps: next time please use lube.

  • Successfully had "credit freeze" fees waived for TransUnion and Experian. They claim the fee is required in my state, but after some round and round talk of logic, I succeeded in having it waived.

    My basic logic used during the call was
    1. There isn't an an Equifax breach letter yet --> there no police report --> therefore no fee waiver as identity theft victim
    2. Equifax call center is broken and all corporate office numbers are on busy or fast busy and unable to get the letters out. Um, and 134 million isn't a secret that TranUnion or Experian are unaware of.
    3. The fee is **not required** by law, but each company is allowed discretion to charge it. The company can make the discretionary decision to charge or waive the $10 fee.
    4. Equifax has made the discretionary decision to waive the fee nationwide and is not in violation of any state law for doing it whether or not a consumer was involved in the 143m breach.
    5. Now, can you [TransUnion / Experian] waive the fee for me?

    FYI - Innovis (a 4th credit agency) has decided to charge no freeze fee ever, so that shoots down any claim they have to charge it.

    Both TransUnion and Experian stated the consumer credit freeze fee of $10 was waived as a one time courtesy. However, I wouldn't be entitled to the add/lift fee waivers in the future that a documented identity theft victim would be allowed under law. That's fine, I just saved $10 + $10 to add the freezes.

  • Come on! It's obvious Equifax wanted to be hacked. Think of all the $$$$ rolling in for credit monitoring there going to make once their free monitoring offers expire. They were intentionally negligent in securing this information because this leek is going to make them and a lot of other monintoring services $$$.

  • From Marketwatch:

    By

    Brett
    Arends

    Columnist

    When Congress hauls in Equifax CEO Richard Smith to grill him, it can start by asking why he put someone with degrees in music in charge of the company’s data security.

    And then they might also ask him if anyone at the company has been involved in efforts to cover up Susan Mauldin’s lack of educational qualifications since the data breach became public.

    It would be fascinating to hear Smith try to explain both of those extraordinary items.

    If those events don’t put the final nails in his professional coffin, accountability in the U.S. is officially dead. And late Friday both Mauldin and the company’s chief information officer were reported to have retired effective immediately.

  • They are also offering free signup to their TrustedID Premier service for 1 year so something else to consider. After signup, got the following message:

    "You will receive an email with a link to finalize your enrollment and activate your product. Please be patient. Due to the high volume of requests, emails may be delayed. If you have not received your email within a few days, please check your spam and junk folders".

    Haven't received the email yet so will see how long that takes to get started.

  • It's not so much that they are covering the cost of updating a single value in the database, but they have to add in the cost of everyone across the country updating that single value at the same time up to x number of times per month. So you then throw in additional support staff for taking calls for people who can't use the internet, extra people to do verification of identity of people calling in or over the internet to make changes to their profile. If more people are freezing their reports and then forget they froze them, and then they're denied a credit app, you have additional people confused about why they have an 850 FICO and couldn't get a gas card. People on this site are extremely well educated about credit as compared to the average consumer. And now imagine supporting the 50% of Americans who aren't even that knowledgeable.

    Don't get me wrong, this is a horrible PR nightmare and the company is going to end up paying for this mistake somehow, but there's more to it than just a database value.

    I think the magnitude of this story hasn't really hit most people yet. This is not only a big data breach in terms of numbers of people impacted, but somehow we let Equifax fall asleep at the wheel with the motherlode of personal data not properly secured. Imagine if some hacker got complete unfettered access to the IRS databases for months and no one knew. That is the scale we're talking about.

    Information security is incredibly lax and when it dawns on people just how crazy we've been for decades now, IT security analysts will be there with years of cage-rattling posts and warnings to say they told us so.

    • Oh my goodness Equifax would be required to take something like 100 Megabytes of data every month from 100 million people. How would they ever afford to do that without charging them a billion dollars in fees ? (At $10 for processing each byte for each value) /s

      You know, if the cost of processing calls and mail requesting this would had been an issues, they could just waive the fee for online automated requests.

      Instead they have to be forced to do that like every greedy corporation by passage Elizabeth Warren's "The Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act " (I already contacted my Senate and house representative about it)

      • Nowhere did I equate data usage with fees. A 100 character request that takes 6 man hours to do costs 6 * hourly employee rate + other costs. I don't mean to excuse their horrible behavior but to provide a business rationale. And even "online automated requests" require employees to maintain and monitor.

        • The cost that is required to maintain and monitor credit freezes is so trivial that a $5 lifetime fee from 100 million of users for example would produce than half a billion dollars which would be enough to cover that segment in pepetuity, including processing occasional snail mail - which probably would be like 1% of requests if that.

          I don't understand how they could justify charging a user who wants to freeze and temporarily unfreeze once a quarter $160 a year for 4 agencies at $40 each

          Netflix charges less and it requires billions in infrastructure spending because of the economy of scale.

          Credit bureaus economy of scale -which is the entire US population and much of worldwide one- is only eclipsed by their greed!

      • Hey Chuck
        Why does everyone on this forum think they are obliged to pay for credit freeze that too to experian(which is the cause of this mess at first place)? Credit freeze(or unfreeze) has always been always free for life when you are a victim of data breach at all 3 major credit reporting bureaus and that too when one of them (experian in this case) has been where the breach occurred.

        I don't know if people on this forum are ill informed but as long as one doesn't fight for their rights, he/she won't get it. Specially the way experian handled this looks like they want to make it seem as nothing ever happend and they owe nothing. It's definitely a blunder to loose almost every persons SSN and personal data in the country. They should be sued for it.

        • You're only eligible for free freezes when you've been the victim of identity theft, that isn't the case for anybody yet due to the Equifax breach.

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