![]() The Lock & Alert approach, she said, was simply a version of the credit freeze "designed for people who are more credit-active," frequently applying for new credit-like Millennials, she explained-while the credit freeze is for people who have fewer, less-frequent interactions with companies who want to check their credit.īut there are other differences, as the Lock & Alert site explains in its FAQ (and also in this infographic), including that credit report locks may not be subject to the same regulatory control: So what does that mean exactly, and how is this different from putting a "security freeze" on my credit report? According to the Equifax spokesperson, there's no difference at all-other than the process required to manage each. OK, so I can now lock and unlock my Equifax credit report at will (or as long as the service is up and running). While attempting to get to the page to do this, however, I found out by happenstance that someone with a Hong Kong address was already typo-squatting on "" and redirecting all requests to Equifax competitor TransUnion. And, voilà, the app worked, both on the Web and on the smart phone. I did this from the webpage and a real keyboard this time. But again, this was a situation that could have been easily resolved by data validation (telling me that my data already existed for another account) rather than a mystery error page that prompted another fruitless call to tech support.Īrmed with that information, I was able to log in to my initial account with the malformed email address and change the email address settings. ![]() This, I was told by my high-level tech support person, was because Equifax had set up the system to not allow two accounts with the same individual's identity information. And then I got a screen informing me, "We are experiencing technical issues." When I then assumed that my account was not actually set up and I created a new one with the same (now without a typo) email address, the app allowed me to. This, I was told by the Equifax tech support representative I spoke to yesterday, was a feature, not a bug: my email address had triggered a fraud warning that a human being needed to address. ![]() When I set up an account from my phone, I entered my email address with a typo at the end-".cm" instead of ".com." Instead of telling me that I had a malformed email address (well, an address in Cameroon), the app went ahead and created the account but then gave me a mysterious error message that instructed me to call technical support. But what the app does, exactly, requires a reading of the website's fine print. Part of the fault for my issues rested between my chair and the touchscreen of my phone, and a whole bunch more rested with the application itself and Equifax's help line. Yesterday, we got on the phone to work out the problem. On Friday afternoon, a spokesperson for Equifax reached out to me and offered to connect me with a senior technical support person to figure out what was going on. Further Reading Equifax, still having problems computering, releases credit locking app that doesn’t
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