Fortunately 'identity theft' is an imaginary concept, you cannot have your identity stolen - you are still you and no one can ever change that. It's the financial institutions' problem to fix at the end of the day, but there is this expectation that you are obliged to help them understand how they fell for a scam, and you are expected to do this for free or they make your life more difficult.
We do need a better system for expats.
Someone on another HN thread suggested the term "bank slander".
I asked about it in the expats Stack Exchange site and others had the same problem: https://expatriates.stackexchange.com/questions/12104/how-ca...
Same goes for Social Security accounts, they require a US address before they permit you to log in online and monitor your account for fraud.
That's odd. IANAL but everyone I know (including lawyers) says that freezing it is the way to go.
Maybe if everyone froze their credit your friend might be looking for new work? ;)
I don't know if it denies the agencies the value of your data, but maybe so, because they clearly don't want you to do it.
It does. There's a cost per credit file to store/manage, and with a freeze in place, no revenue generation can occur on that file.
Highly recommend US residents freezing their Work Number file [1], in addition to their credit file at each of the 3 credit reporting agencies.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/how-to-opt-out-of-equifa...
Why? Is it really that hard getting it unfrozen?
Equifax — 1-800-349-9960
Experian — 1-888-397-3742
TransUnion — 1-888-909-8872
Innovis — 1-800-540-2505
A lawyer friend of mine who specializes in identity theft told me this was too extreme a way to go and that I should sign up for Credit Karma. But isn't that just opening up yet another access point to thieves? Plus, I feel that freezing my credit denies these reporting agencies the value of data.