IMPORTANT! Freeze your credit! Here are the links as of 7/11/2022
I found out recently a lot of people were unaware of the Equifax hack that breached 147.9 Million peoples credit information. For reference the US population is 329.5 Million as of 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
This is the post from the FTC on the general topic.
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2018/09/free-credit-freezes-are-here
This is one that we know of. I am sure there are tons of others we are not aware of. Please ensure you freeze your accounts.
You need to reach out to all the major credit agencies. Navigate their websites to the credit freeze part. Do NOT pay for this. Some of them are tricky and it seems like you have to possibly pay for an account, but you should be able to set it up without paying for anything. Make sure you keep track of all the PIN’s and passwords for each. Use something like a password safe to store it. I will try to keep these links updated but if any of them stop working please let me know via my contact info on this website. I would post it here but the screen grabber bots will spam me if I do 🙁
DIRECT LINKS TO FREEZE CREDIT
Experian https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
Transunion https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
Equifax https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/
And this one is not as well-known
but I do it anyways Innovis https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze
Things to keep in mind is you need to do a temporary lift for a bunch of reasons. Such as a new Credit Card, new job, using Credit Monitoring apps, etc. So, make sure you keep an organized method to log into each of these to do the temporary lift.
And this is of course for the US, not sure for anywhere else.
I have also copied phone numbers and url’s to each sites info from the ftc page here for your convenience below.
Phone Numbers to Freeze Credit
Equifax
Equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services
800-685-1111
Experian
Experian.com/help
888-EXPERIAN (888-397-3742)
Transunion
TransUnion.com/credit-help
888-909-8872