Small rant: Perhaps I’m getting old and cynical, but the entire process through their sites feels a lil sketchy lol

Sure, it requires the basics, along with your SSN and cellphone to receive a text confirmation. Can’t just be me, right?

Anyways, thanks for answering my crazy questions due to my lack of faith in the safety of the internet in the days of SEO’s. 🤣

  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    No. Almost lost our house build because it took them so long to unfreeze. Some agencies are easy. Some are outright customer hostile. I won’t do it again.

  • LordCrom@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I froze my credit on the big 3. Only unfreeze when I know I’ll be buying something like a car that needs financing. I did it…it’s easy … Just keep track of your passwords and questions when freezing the accounts.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    You can’t freeze a credit score.

    The scores can and usually will still change even while frozen.

    What you can do is enable a security freeze on your credit account, which disallows a credit score from being provided to a bank for assessing your credit worthiness of a loan or credit card or mortgage or afterpay/klarna/microloan type thing.

    Freezing your credit is mostly a way of making it so that someone with your personal info can’t open a fraudulent account in your name.

    There are three companies, credit bureaus, in the US that keep giant permanent records of everyone’s credit history.

    TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

    Your credit history and other info can differ between all three of them, if there are errors, you have to get them resolved with each one seperately.

    There are many different algorithms / scoring models that each of these 3 will use to calculate your actual score.

    VantageScore and FICO are the main ones, and the algorithm for each gets updated every few years.

    https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/vantagescore-vs-fico

    So… you can have a FICO or VantageScore from TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

    Different banks or apartments or car loans will all use different scores from different bureaus, and there is usually no way to tell exactly scoring model they’ll use before hand… and actually fully applying for anything that requires a ‘hard inquiry’ into your credit history… that in and of itself will hurt your credit score.

    CreditKarma and KikOff will give you your Vantage Scores for free, but not FICO scores.

    CreditKarma will only give you TransUnion and Equifax scores, but KikOff also gives you Experian.

    Beyond that, other companies have other apps that may give you scores not provided by CK or KO, but you generally have to pay a monthly subscription for that.

    If this all sounds like a giant confusing mess, ripe for scamming opportunities, that’s because it is, and it will only get worse now that Trump and Elon are completely destroying all kinds of financial regulation agencies.

  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I’m reasonably certain they have all been hacked recently, and they don’t take security seriously, because: Why bother? They’ll never face any serious consequences, and their power will continue unchecked.

    • RustyShackleford@literature.cafeOP
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      1 year ago

      I mean, this is exactly how it feels these days, and it sorta does feel like the entry field for my information on those sites isn’t that safe lol. Let alone professional, makes you wonder if the sites legitimate. 🥴

          • Flagstaff@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Credit bureaus are certainly evil but modern life in the US still forces us to work with them, so you may as well register free online credentials with them all so you can check the records they have on you for accuracy. They actually do respond quite consistently fast. I once had a LendingClub thing listed in my history when I’ve never touched anything involving the company, and whichever-bureau-it-was (I can’t remember any more) promptly removed it upon my informing them.

            It’s definitely worth doing.