- Let's be honest here,
there are a lot of well-meaning people
on the internet giving overly complex advice
about online security and privacy.
It's a line that even I myself get too close to at times
should you abandon all apple products,
pay for everything using crypto?
Only connect to the internet via Tor?
should you install a Linux based operating system?
This is advice that assumes you're some kind of spy
or important figure whose data is being actively monitored.
Whereas the reality is that most
of this is just a distraction for us.
It keeps us for taking the time
to do the necessary important steps
for our general protection.
So today I'm gonna walk you
through one such task that I believe is important
for all of us to do.
It's free.
It will only take you 10 minutes
and surprisingly few people talk about it.
(chimes)
Welcome to All Things Secured.
My name's Josh.
And today we're doing a practical tutorial
on how to put a freeze on your credit.
Now I want to quickly explain why I think this is important
for you to do and warn you
about the biggest potential hassles you'll encounter.
But if you wanna go ahead
and just jump straight to the tutorial,
you can use the time marker that you see here.
So let's start with the basics.
You know, that you have a credit score, right?
There are credit bureaus that track your credit
worthiness based on your spending patterns,
what kind of debt you have,
whether it's good or bad debt and so on.
This isn't just for as citizens either,
this applies to people all over the world.
Whenever you want to open a new credit card to buy a car
or to take out a mortgage for a new house
anything that requires borrowing money.
These bureaus communicate behind the scenes
with these companies to share whether
or not you are a safe person to lend money to.
The system itself is good and necessary
but most people don't use it to their advantage.
The problem is is that as hard as we try
to protect our financial data
or just any of our personal data online,
statistics indicate that your identity is floating around
on the black market right now,
or if it isn't it will likely do so at some point.
Here's an example,
a few years ago, a hacker gained access to my Gmail account.
This is obviously before I had secured it
with two factor authentication
and they were able to Snoop around enough to find a document
from 10 years ago that had my social security number on it.
Within 10 minutes, a credit card was open
in Florida using my identity number
that could have easily ruined my credit
and online reputation.
Thankfully, I was able to move quickly to cancel that card
and secure my Gmail account,
but it taught me something very important
about credit bureaus.
The credit bureau did nothing wrong, hear me out,
but they have the power to stop this kind
of attack before it begins.
And that is where the credit freeze comes in.
By law, these credit bureaus are required
to give you the option to freeze any
and all request for new credit to be issued.
So if there had been a credit freeze
on my account a few years ago,
the bank in Florida would've received the application
for a new credit card,
they would've checked with the credit bureau
and then they would've been told
that all new credit had been frozen.
The application would've been denied
and nothing would've happened.
Now, credit bureaus make money through this whole process.
So they don't promote the credit freeze option
because it ties their hands.
They might try to sell you on a credit lock
or what's known as a fraud alert,
but these are not saying don't fall for it.
With a lock or a fraud alert,
the credit bureaus are still legally allowed
to sell your data to third parties,
which is a a huge revenue driver for them.
You know how you get those notices
in the mail that you are preapproved for a credit card
or that you're eligible for a debt reduction service.
Yeah, that's likely the result
of a credit bureau selling your data.
A credit freeze prohibits them
from replying to credit checks and selling your data.
And that, in my opinion is really important.
It's such a no brainer,
in fact, that I don't understand why we don't hear
about this more often.
There are two big hassles that you'll have to deal
with here that I wanna warn you about.
The first is the fact that a credit freeze,
it needs to be set up with each individual credit bureau.
It takes a little bit of time
but as you'll see in the tutorial, it's not that long.
They purposely don't wanna make it easy.
And they don't talk to each other
about this one thing just because they wanna make it hard.
The second is that in the future
when you legitimately need to borrow money
have to jump through a few extra hoops.
I mean, you'll have to remember to unfreeze your credit
or thaw it, which would need to be done
at least an hour in advance of any credit request.
Otherwise, if you don't do this, you'll find yourself
at the car dealership having
to had your credit application denied
and then waiting for an hour
while you thought your freeze to try again.
Does that make sense?
If you have any questions
about why this is important or what it all means,
please leave them in the comments below
but for now let's jump onto my computer
and I'll show you exactly how I set up the credit freeze
on each of the three major credit bureaus for free.
All right, so you can use the links here.
I'll have this link to a page that has all these links
but you I'm also gonna put it
in the description where you can go
and visit the Equifax website
specifically their freeze page.
So I'm gonna click on, add a credit freeze.
And one of the things that you're gonna notice as we go
through this tutorial is that you're gonna have to give
over a lot of information and that is common
but don't worry about it because trust me,
they already have this information.
All they're doing is verifying your identity.
So I'm giving them my name.
I'm giving them my address.
I'm giving them even my social security number
or my ID number.
And this will allow them to verify that I am who I say
that I am so I can put a freeze on that account.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click that I'm not a robot
and then click on continue.
And we're gonna continue on in the process.
For Equifax and each of these credit unions is different.
I'm gonna have to create an account.
So I'll create an account
with them using my email address and then confirm my email.
And of course, I'm going to create a password.
If you guys have been watching All Things Secured
for a while, you know
that I use one password to store my passwords
instead of putting it in my test vault
I am actually gonna put it in my private vault
and I'm gonna save my account here for Equifax.
The reason you wanna do that for sure is
because I wanna be able to log back in and thaw
or unfreeze any credit freeze that I'm creating right now.
So in order to my identity
they're going to send me a one time code to my email.
So if you see here, I'm just gonna go into my email.
I'm going to copy that code.
And then I'm gonna go in and paste it
into this place where I can verify my code
and they're gonna process and verify my information.
All right, now the account setup is complete.
That's just step one with Equifax, but trust me
it's not too much longer here.
We're gonna jump in
and we're going to place a freeze here with Equifax.
So they're gonna give you a little bit
of information it's free at what it does
and then how you would take and make sure
that you need to go into the others Experian
and TransUnion to make sure you do a freeze there as well.
So we're gonna place that freeze.
And then the freeze is done.
The only other thing that you're gonna wanna make sure you
do is to download that confirmation PDF.
This just ensures that you've gotta place,
a record of the freeze so that if you needed
to go back and unfreeze it and something went wrong,
you have that record that you placed the freeze.
So this is what it looks like.
If you wanted to look,
I'm gonna go ahead and open this right now.
So you can see all it is is just an official document
that says we're writing to confirm
that a security freeze was placed
on your Equifax credit report.
And then if you go down, they're telling you how to go ahead
and do that same thing on TransUnion and Experian.
So there we go.
It took us.
Gosh, I think it's only been like three minutes now
where we have placed that freeze on Equifax.
I'm not speeding this up in any way.
This is done in real time so that you can see it.
I'm gonna go back and open up Experian.
And now we're gonna do the same thing with Experian.
I'm going to add a security freeze
and then freeze my own credit file.
And we're gonna do the same thing.
I'm gonna add my name.
I'm going to add my last name, my address.
I have to give a over my social security number.
I'm gonna have to give over my date of birth
and my email address.
This is all gonna be familiar to you.
And it shouldn't be that hard for you to be able to do.
But one of the things that I, that is interesting
with Experian is that they're gonna give you a pin number
and that pin is what's gonna allow you to thaw
or unfreeze your credit freeze, and you can have them
just give you one.
Or if you notice here I'm gonna click yes
to creating my own pin.
And that's where I'm gonna go in.
And I have to create a pin between five
and 10 digits that I'll use to be able
to unfreeze or thaw out my account.
All right, I've clicked continue.
This is something that both Experian and TransUnion do
to verify your identity.
And that's where you've probably seen this before.
You have to go in and answer a number of questions about
did you open this credit card?
What year did you do this?
Have you ever lived
in the following county or on the following street?
And a lot of the answers they'll give you four
or five, you know, potential answers.
And then one, the very last one will be none of the above.
And you know, you can, you just have to guess sometimes
because I mean, you shouldn't be have,
you should know the answers obviously
but sometimes it's the questions are confusing to me.
All right.
Anyway, we've to that, my identity has been verified
and then my personal identification number is there.
I can print that off to keep it from my records.
I'm gonna go ahead and do that.
Print that page, keep it on a safe place on my computer.
And then we're really done here.
So I can go ahead and close out Experian.
And now we just have one more left and that is TransUnion.
So I'm gonna go over here.
I'm gonna click on TransUnion and I'm going to want
to add a freeze for the TransUnion account.
TransUnion is just like the others where we have
to create an account in order
to put that freeze on our account.
So I'm gonna speed this up just a little bit where I've put
in my address, my email address,
they even ask for my phone number,
but all of this I've done it before.
My date of birth, the last four digits
of my social security number.
And no, I don't want you to send me a whole bunch of emails.
(chuckles)
So I'm gonna create an account
with a username and a password.
And of course, saving that password
in one password in my private vault.
And then they also ask me to do a secret question
where you know, if I forget my password
or something that can use this question
to verify my identity.
So I'm gonna accept and continue to step three.
And this is where again,
I'm asked all these questions to verify
that I actually am who I say I am,
that I lived, that I had this phone number
that I lived in this county
or that I lived in this city in 2001.
So I'm gonna answer those questions and verify my identity.
Great, now we're done with TransUnion
and we need to add that credit freeze
once we've created our account.
So I'm gonna click on that, click add freeze
and then I'm going to go ahead and create my pin again.
You can use the same pin.
You can use a new pin.
It's completely up to you.
You just need to make sure that you store
that pin number so that you can go in
and unfreeze your account when you need to do that.
And there we go.
My pin number is set.
The freeze is now on with TransUnion
and all of my credit accounts are frozen.
And just like that
a freeze has been placed with all three credit bureaus.
It didn't take that long
as you saw an it was absolutely free
just like I told you.
There are just those two things to remember here.
First, make sure you keep your login information
or pin numbers so
that you can thaw the freeze when you need to.
And second, think about other members of your family
including even your kids, as those who might possibly need
to have their credit frozen as well.
It's a very set it and for get it type of action.
And there's no good reason not to protect yourself
in this way.
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than an hour to implement, take care.