Freeze your credit before someone else uses it

Every day there is some breach and emails go out warning users or customers that their personal details have been stolen. It even happened with Equifax. After you've been notified you've been part of a breach, what should you do?

Most people, if they do anything at all, sign up for credit monitoring. Monitoring is an alarm. It tells you, after the fact, that someone has opened an account in your name, so you can start cleaning up the mess. There is a better tool, and most people have never set it up: a credit freeze. The freeze is a lock. It stops an account from being opened at all.

What a freeze does

When anyone applies for credit in your name, a card, a car loan, a phone plan, the lender pulls your credit report first to decide whether to approve it. A freeze locks that report. While it is on, no lender can pull your file. This means no new account can be opened, by a thief or by you, until you lift it. Your existing cards keep working. The credit you already have is untouched. The door to new borrowing is simply locked until you unlock it.

The strength is that the freeze blocks the lookup itself, no matter who is asking. A thief can hold every detail about you, your Social, your address, your mother's maiden name, and still hit a wall.

Two limits, so you know its edges. A freeze does not touch your credit score. And it does not stop fraud on a card you already have, since spending on an existing card triggers no credit pull. Watch your statements for that. The freeze is built for one job, stopping brand-new accounts opened in your name, which happens to be the most expensive and most exhausting kind to undo.

The catch most people trip on

The companies best placed to tell you about freezes would rather sell you something else. Search "credit freeze" and you wade through ads for credit monitoring, credit "lock" apps, and identity-protection subscriptions. Often these cost a few dollars a month, sometimes far more. Some of those products are fine. None of them is a freeze. By federal law the real freeze is free, at all three bureaus. This goes for placing the freeze, and lifting it. If a page asks for your card number to "protect your identity," close it. You are on the wrong page.

How to do it

You have to freeze your file at each of the three big bureaus separately, because a lender might check any one of them. Block out fifteen minutes and do all three in one sitting.

• Equifax: equifax.com
• Experian: experian.com
• TransUnion: transunion.com

Each one makes you create an account and answer a few identity questions only you should be able to answer. Once you are in, the freeze is a switch. Each bureau gives you a PIN or ties the freeze to your login. Save those in your password manager so you can find them when you need them.

When you actually need to borrow

A freeze is not a one-way door. When you want new credit, a card, a car, internet at a new address, you "thaw" your file. Lift the freeze for a set window, say three days, or for one named lender, and it locks itself back afterward. If you know which bureau a lender uses, you can thaw just that one, though thawing all three for a day costs nothing but a couple of minutes. Plan for the extra step before a big application and you will never feel it.

Do it for the whole household

Freeze your file, your spouse's, and your kids'. Children are a favorite target precisely because nobody thinks to check a seven-year-old's credit. So the fraud can run unnoticed for a decade, until they apply for their first card and find someone got there first. A child's freeze takes a little more, usually by mail with copies of documents, but the protection is identical and the payoff is larger.

If this has you thinking about how much of your information is already loose in the world, two other pieces of mine are worth a look: one on the data brokers selling reports about how you drive, and one on what your own photos give away about where you live. The freeze does not fix those, but it does shut the most damaging door.

A freeze is the strongest move you can make against identity theft, but it is not a force field. Keep half an eye on your existing accounts, and pull your free credit reports once or twice a year to confirm nothing is on there you did not put there. But if you do only one thing after reading this, freeze your credit.

The trade is lopsided. Fifteen minutes now, once, or months later proving a stranger’s debt is not yours.

Set yours up this week, and if a bureau's identity check trips you up, which happens, write back. Those snags are common and the workarounds are usually quick.

Joel · joel@freshfromcache.com

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission, "Equifax Data Breach Settlement": ftc.gov.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "What is a credit freeze or security freeze on my credit report?": consumerfinance.gov.
• USA.gov, "How to place or lift a security freeze on your credit report" (2025): usa.gov.
• Federal Trade Commission, identity-theft reporting and recovery: identitytheft.gov.
• Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (2018), the federal law that makes security freezes free at all three bureaus.
• Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion security-freeze pages (linked above).