Why YSK: Locking your credit with the main 3 places is not enough.
https://innovis.com/ have grown enough to require locking as providers are using them as a single check source.
There’s also https://www.chexsystems.com/ which many banks use for opening checking accounts. They’re unique because they handle accounts that don’t show up in a credit report.
In order to open a line of credit (credit card or loan), the lender will pull your credit record to determine your creditworthiness. The “big three” credit record companies being referenced are Transunion, Equifax, and Experian. Based on your credit “score” with one or more of those reporting agencies, the lender will approve or decline your request to borrow, and determine the interest rate they’ll charge you.
“Locking your credit” means telling those reporting agencies, “Hey, don’t let anyone pull my credit.” Why would you want to do that? Because of identity theft. If someone gets enough information about you, they can borrow money using your identity, and never pay it back. This situation is a fucking nightmare.
By locking your credit, you gain a huge amount of control over anyone - including yourself - from borrowing from a lender. Each credit reporting agency offers this option, at no charge, and the lock can be temporarily or permanently lifted by you (login, 2FA, sometimes you can even specify a specific lender who is allowed to pull your credit while continuing to forbid anyone else).
It is highly recommended to lock your credit. Frankly, it should be locked by default. In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. That’s essentially everyone in America who can take out a loan.
OP’s post indicates that there are at least two lesser-known reporting agencies that you should look into to secure your credit reports.
Note that, before this incident, it wasn’t consistently free. I remember it being free to lock, but costing $20 or so to unlock. A law passed in 2018 required credit bureaus to offer freezes and unfreezes (and to fulfill them within certain time frames) for free.
Also note that you might need to look for a “freeze” instead of a lock. Experian charges $25/month for their “CreditLock” service, for example, but they offer a free security freeze.
Interesting, I just tried to lock my credit and was prompted to pay for a premium account to do so.
Yeah, they do all they can to push the premium accounts, but there’s a free option buried in there somewhere.