(Note: TransUnion recently disconnected it’s fax line and is now refusing to offer a safe alternative to US mail 12/18) FYI – Don’t sign the letter yourself until you are in the presence of the notary.This is simply a letter swearing under penalty of perjury that you are the child’s legal guardian and have the authority to freeze your child’s credit.Notarized Description of Authority (Click Here for a Sample).Parent’s Utility Bill (with matching home address).Parent’s Government Issued ID (with home address).The summaries above identify security concerns and include hard-to-find contact information, tips and sample documents specific to each credit bureau. You’ll also find a candid description of the hurdles and successes I encountered along the way. Each “Child Credit Freeze Summary” above streamlines the child credit freeze process for that bureau. The three bureaus have different procedures to freeze your child’s credit. STEP 1 – Review the detailed “Child Credit Freeze Summary” for each credit bureau. However, if you do want to/need to freeze your child’s credit immediately, we highly recommend sending your documents to the bureaus via Certified or Registered Mail so that you can track the delivery and ensure it arrives safely at the bureau. Equifax does still offer a fax option as an alternative to mail. In the meantime, you can review our step-by-step child credit freeze guide below and begin gathering the necessary documents. We suggest holding off on step 3 for Experian and Transuion until we update this post with an alternative to mail. We have reached out to regulators and hope to have a secure alternative to share with you soon. They require parents mail in full SSNa along with birth certificates and a slew of other sensitive information. Privacy advocates like Consumer Watchdog note that the refusal to offer a secure alternative to mail seems to contradict the spirit of the law which also requires the credit bureaus to let you request that freeze via “telephone or secure electronic means.” In addition, the mail-only policy is at odds with various state laws prohibit printing Social Security numbers on materials that are mailed. They use to make money off child credit freezes and only allowed them in certain states. Incidentally, these changes follow a recent federal law that now requires the bureaus to allow all parents to freeze their child’s credit for free. To be clear, Experian does still have the online upload function and will allow adults (who they can charge) to use it, but they will not allow parents to use it for the child credit freeze. Unfortunately, Transunion recently decided they would no longer offer an alternative to mail and disconnected their fax without warning. Similarly, Experian is no longer allowing parents to use its secure online upload function to submit the sensitive documents necessary for a child credit freeze. Experian added a secure online upload feature. Ultimately, Transunion & Equifax agreed to allow parents to fax in documents upon request. In “How I Forced the Bureaus to Freeze My Child’s Credit,” I outlined the security risks and detailed my 6-month effort to encourage the bureaus to voluntarily offer an alternative to mail. READ MORE: Experian Child Credit Freeze Warning: Parents Beware of Mailing Sensitive Infoīack in 2016 I reported that the credit bureaus themselves were putting the identities of both parents and children at risk by requiring parents to mail sensitive documents to a PO box. We recently discovered some of the bureaus may be, once again, requiring you to mail in sensitive documents despite laws intended to prevent that. However, the process is still not perfect… How I Forced the Bureaus to Freeze My Child’s Credit.Several years, several massive hacks and several pieces of legislation later, every parent now has the right to freeze their kid’s credit and utilize the single best tool to prevent financial ID theft. When I set out to create this guide for parents, I never imagined it could be so difficult. NOTE: This page was originally published in 2015 & was last updated in October 2018.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |