Mysterian - Part 2

We recently posted about issues people were having with enrolling or staying enrolled with Experian, the credit rating service.* A blog reader emailed me with concerns about the more general issue of being enrolled with Experian. My response:

The university has made you eligible to enroll with Experian for free. It hasn't enrolled you. That is your choice. So if you don't want to enroll, you don't have to. Normally, people who choose to enroll with Experian pay for the service. If you choose to enroll, you get it free - presumably at the university's expense. It is true that when you enroll, you have to give personal information such as your Social Security number. But Experian already has that information. Anyone who has ever gotten a credit card, mortgage, etc., is already recorded at Experian and the other credit rating companies. So, giving the information when you enroll is essentially an ID check to see if you are really who you say you are. 

What I would suggest doing, whether you enroll or not, is to freeze your credit. You don't need to enroll to freeze your credit. Thanks to the various data breaches that have occurred at UC and elsewhere, bad actors already have your information. Freezing your credit will make identity theft less likely. Freezing your credit won't 100% stop all forms of fraud, but it will help. The downside of freezing your credit is that if you need to do something such as obtain a new credit card, you have to unfreeze temporarily, which can be a nuisance. I personally have frozen my credit - long before the more recent breaches - and have enrolled with Experian.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2024/04/mysterian.html.