#Equifax lifting freeze free

A credit freeze does not have an impact on your current credit accounts, and it can be permanently removed (thawed, unfrozen) or temporarily lifted when necessary. It's a possibility, but not the most likely one.A credit freeze is powerful because even when a criminal gathers your personal information, he or she has no way to use it to open a new credit card account, loan, or other line-of-credit. Consumers are obviously not doing that by snail mail, so it seems unreasonable to assume that they are conspiring to stop us from accessing our credit with only anecdotal, seemingly coincidental evidence.

#Equifax lifting freeze free

During COVID-19, some credit agencies even began offering free credit reports once per week. That doesn't mean that this happening as in the past we've seen companies, industries, and nations adopt massive, suicidal conspiracies against all logic, but it seems rather conspiratorial to first assume that the companies are purposefully harming us. This is the stuff of wet dreams for lawyers across the nation. If the credit reporting agencies are discovered to be purposefully making it impractical for citizens to access or freeze their credit reports, they could be bankrupted by a massive class-action lawsuit.

Thus, my intentions were derailed, as always. If I can't freeze at all of the agencies, then I won't freeze any of them because doing so will become confusing over time (which agency is frozen or unfrozen?). I intended to freeze my credit reports back in 2011, perhaps after a similar reminder on Security Now (this isn't the first time this issue has come up on the show, of course), but I seem to recall that one of the agencies still wanted me to pay for a credit freeze/unfreeze back then. Everything may still be fine as I have not been contacted about loan defaults or anything like that, but it bothered me when not a single question in the Equifax questionnaire was about a real event. Unfortunately, I no longer have a working printer, so this paperwork thing gets more and more difficult with each passing year. To do this, I'll have to make a photocopy of my Social Security card and some other identity-related paperwork (I haven't received a W-2 since 2007). Now I'm concerned about my credit reports and will have to go through the process of requesting them via snail mail at each agency. Equifax (I think) asks a lot of questions about my credit history and while they have always thrown in a few 'fake' questions, perhaps to reduce information exposure, I went through the questionnaire 4 times last week and at one of those times none of the questions were valid all of them were about activities that never happened. I last requested my credit reports online in 2012, which is obviously too long ago as back then I was faithfully requesting my reports annually (yes, 1 report every 4 months is more optimal, but I never achieved that regularity). However, none of the Big 3 will recognize my identity and allow to either receive a credit report or freeze my credit. The entire point of the agreement was to have a single point of contact for our free credit reports! Geesh. That's ridiculous and the regulators should be able force Innovis to participate. On sidenote, how convenient is it for Innovis that they were not part of the 2012 federal agreement to create and maintain the website? How stupid was it for the government to negotiate this agreement without including a provision that all future credit reporting companies would have to also participate in the new clearing house? Today, consumers now have to use the Big 3 website and do a separate request from Innovis. This is not implausible as I have had no 'activity' on my credit since around 2007 when I last got a new credit card. It took 2 weeks, but I received it yesterday and it turns out that Innovis has no entries whatsoever on my credit report. I can no longer even access my credit report from the big 3 agencies, even through, but Innovis happily mailed me my report in the mail. While it's possible that the credit agencies are purposefully preventing us from freezing our credit, it's more likely that they're simply paranoid about securing identities for their own sakes.