A few weeks ago, many, many Social Security numbers (SSNs) were stolen from a background check company called National Public Data. This has been reported in the national news for the past couple of weeks. My credit monitoring service let me know this week that mine was one of the stolen SSNs. Perhaps one of the 272 million or so stolen SSNs was yours.
This means that people could potentially use your SSN and related personal information to apply for a loan in your name.
Let me boil this down for you: The most important thing you can do right now to protect yourself from identify theft or bad actors applying for credit in your name is to freeze your credit file at all the major credit reporting agencies:
- Equifax: https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/
- Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
- TransUnion: https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
This is a FREE service available from each of the agencies. Be warned that when you go to freeze your credit file they often try to upsell you into buying paid services. Those paid services may have additional features that interest you, but payment should not be required to freeze your credit files.
Freeze your credit files
To freeze your credit file, do the following for each of the credit reporting agencies.
- Navigate the agency website to where you can freeze your credit file. Links are provided above in this article.
- If you don’t already have a login account at the agency, create one. (Note: create a new, strong password for every new account you create.)
- Freeze your credit file. You may need to create a personal identification number (PIN) for the freeze.
- Save the account user name, password and freeze PIN in a safe place, preferably a password manager app.
Save all your passwords, PINs, credit card information and other personal data in a place that is reasonably safe and convenient to use. I could write a long article about this, but for now I recommend using a password manager app like NordPass or 1Password, or use Apple iCloud Keychain which is integrated into Apple operating systems. I don’t recommend using a web browser to save passwords or personal information.
Un-freeze a credit file when you need it
When you apply for credit, ask the creditor (the bank, car dealership, and so on) which credit reporting agency they want to use to check your creditworthiness. Then log back into your account on that agency’s website and temporarily un-freeze your credit file. Be sure to re-freeze it if it does not re-freeze automatically after a certain amount of time.
Take care of your own interests
While I would not agree that this hack was a good thing (like the title of this excellent article by Adam Clark Estes on Vox suggests), I do think that if people take this incident as a strong warning to protect themselves from identify theft, then those people will be safer for it.
(Image generated by Microsoft Copilot.)
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