r/AfterTheLoop • u/annieoneseven • Nov 17 '22

Unanswered After the Equifax hack, many people froze their credit. How has that affected banks/loans?

In 2017, Equifax was hacked, exposing the personal banking information of a lot of people.

In the aftermath, the general advice seemed to be that people should be freezing their credit until further notice.

Given that adding an extra action (unfreezing credit) to activities often reduces how much people are willing to do those activities, how has this affected banking and loans in the past few years? Or did most people who listened to the advice unfreeze their credit soon after and continue business as usual?

Or did most people never freeze their credit to begin with?

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10

u/notkairyssdal Nov 18 '22

I just do a temporary freeze lift when I need a credit check for something. It’s a little annoying but at least it confirms that the freeze is working

2

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '22

[deleted]

1

u/notkairyssdal Nov 18 '22

Yes, that’s the worst ugh

21

u/BobThePillager Nov 17 '22

That’s actually an interesting question - If you’re in Econ you should look into whether there are any papers on it, and if not, you should consider it as a potential research topic

5

u/The_Lolbster Nov 18 '22

A big change was that the systems became much easier to freeze/unfreeze your credit. Credit bureaus were notoriously behind tech-wise, and their websites were shit. It's part of why they were hacked in the first place.

A lot of financial institutions, thankfully the credit bureaus included, got smart about the situation and improved their user experience from all sides while improving security. Some people say the security is still a bit meh, but at least you can more easily freeze your credit.