How the freeze works
Each of the three credit bureaus has to be frozen separately, online or by phone, and federal law has made it free since 2018. You come away with an account or a PIN at each bureau. When you apply for a loan, an apartment or a new phone plan, ask which bureau the company uses and lift the freeze at that one for a few days. A lift requested online takes effect within the hour. The freeze does nothing to your credit score or your existing cards. It also does nothing about fraud on accounts you already hold.
Freeze, alert or lock
A fraud alert is a lighter tool. You place it with one bureau, which notifies the other two, and for a year lenders are asked to verify your identity before opening anything. It suits the weeks after a lost wallet. A credit lock is a bureau's commercial product that does roughly what a freeze does, sometimes for a monthly fee and without the same legal backing. Take the freeze.
Beyond the credit file
- Request an Identity Protection PIN from the IRS, a six-digit number reissued each year, which stops anyone else from filing a tax return under your Social Security number.
- Leave your Social Security card at home, and ask why a form wants the number, since many offices will accept a blank.
- Pull your free credit reports through annualcreditreport.com and read them for accounts and addresses you do not recognize.
- Opt out of prescreened credit offers through the bureaus' joint opt-out service, which cuts down the preapproved mail a thief can lift from your mailbox.
- Freeze a child's credit as well, because a clean file with no owner watching it can be abused for years before anyone notices.
If it happens anyway
The signs are bills for accounts you never opened, a collections call about an unfamiliar debt, a rejected tax return because one was already filed, or mail that stops arriving. Go to the FTC's IdentityTheft.gov, which produces an identity theft report and a step-by-step recovery plan with letters already drafted. Close the fraudulent accounts in writing, and dispute the entries with each bureau. File a police report if a creditor asks for one. Keep a log of every call, with the date, the name and what was promised.
Tip Store the three bureau logins in your password manager on the day you set the freezes. The common complaint about freezing is not the freeze but the lost PIN, discovered at a car dealership on a Saturday afternoon.
