A report by Credit Sesame was featured on Bloomberg. The report highlighted an analysis of 4.5 million TransUnion credit profiles that showed a 0.8 percent increase from June.
Freeze Your Credit, Retire Richer
by Suzanne Woolley
Consumer advocacy groups such as U.S. PIRG, along with Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, say consumers should be able to freeze their credit reports at all three major credit bureaus easily and for free.
Sounds good. But how to get people to do it?
Few of us actually freeze our credit files, even in the wake of such massive data breaches as the one at Equifax Inc., which compromised the private data of as many as 145 million Americans. About 2 percent to 3 percent of U.S. consumers currently have freezes on their credit, Gartner Research analyst Avivah Litan has estimated, and she thinks the Equifax breach might push that to 5 percent. Meanwhile, Credit Karma Inc., which says it has 75 million members, saw a tenfold increase in the number of consumers freezing at least one credit report the week after the breach was announced. But after increasing every day starting Sept. 8, activity dropped off on Sept. 15.
A Credit Sesame analysis of 4.5 million TransUnion LLC credit profiles showed that as of Sept. 25, just 0.44 percent of them had a freeze on their TransUnion report, an 0.8 percent increase from June.
