Freeze Your Own Credit!

I had coffee with my friend Greg Wright of Greg Wright & Associates LLC last week, and he mentioned something very interesting that I thought I would share. I've promoted credit freeze solutions over monitoring/alerting for a while now. It is possible for identity thieves to freeze credit bureau activity on stolen identities, making it even harder for the victim to resolve their issues.

This is similar to an old denial-of-service attack method where you lock someone out of their account by purposely using bad usernames/passwords so that they can't log in. As before, I recommend that my contacts consider freezing their own credit bureau profiles. Doing this first could help prevent an identity thief from doing it for you. It can also be more effective than credit monitoring and alerting services.

I debated publishing this information in an article for a few days. There is always a concern that sharing knowledge of an attack method can promote the attacks. In the end, the bad guys seem to get this information eventually regardless of whether we share it. I hope that regulatory, law enforcement, and credit agencies are working on solutions for those that are the victims of these problems.

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