This brought me to the following question: How much does it cost to lock your credit with Experian?
Among the most often occurring and universal issues people deal with year are credit fraud and identity theft. Having your data fall into the wrong hands is rather dangerous as it may lead to identity theft, illegal loans obtained, and long-lasting effects on credit records and scores. This ensures that one acts in the required way to protect their credit basket. One first action a person might take is to freeze their credit records. The expenses that could be involved in doing this with Experian are broken out here.
A Credit Lock is an advanced tool designed to enable consumers to actively manage their credit reports or files to prevent Identity Theft.
A credit lock is a mechanism that enables you to suspend access to your Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion credit reports to potential lenders or other third parties. This ensures that fraudsters do not open credit facilities in your name, and also identity theft is prevented. Once the lock is done, it will remain there permanently on your credit report unless you decide to unlock it. This offers you far more control over which individuals can access your records than if you placed a fraud alert or a security freeze on your credit.
Cost of freezing your credit with Experian
Experian’s Credit Locking service is called Experian IdentityWorksSM Premium. This will give you the leverage to be able to lock or unlock your Experian credit report online or via its mobile app at any one, given time with no limit on the number of locks and unlocks one can do.
The Experian IdentityWorksSM Premium is available for $24. 99 for the first month if you opt to pay monthly. But it makes sense to pay a bit less every month for an annual membership instead of a monthly one.
The costs are:
- $19. 99 per month, if a customer decides to pay for a subscription annually, this will cost $239. 88.
Hence, even though the service may appear to cost more than a free fraud alert, it allows exacting and easy control over the accessibility of your Experian credit report. Also, the longer the number of months you pre-pay for, the cheaper the amount is going to be.
What does Experian IdentityWorksSM Premium Cover?
Along with unlimited locking and unlocking of your Experian credit report, an Experian IdentityWorksSM Premium membership also includes these key features:
- Credit monitoring notifies you of changes in your credit profile, including new credit inquiries, accounts opened in your name, a change in your address, and many others.
- This involves monitoring the dark web until such time that your data surfaces on sites that are used by cybercriminals.
- Included in the identity theft protection plan are Identity theft insurance and assistance if you do fall victim of identity theft while under this plan.
- Legal and reporting service, and Identity theft legal and lost wages up to $1,000,000
For the monthly or annual fee, you would get assured credit locking features as well as monitoring and protection services that can alert you of any wrongful use of your data.
It is not necessary to lock all three credit reports because locking only one or two credit reports can be enough.
One of the best ways to protect yourself from credit fraud which can be initiated from your Experian credit report is to lock your Experian credit report through the IdentityWorksSM Premium service. Just remember that all your three basic credit reports are at Experian, TransUnion, and also Equifax. It is also important to note that some of these reports may not necessarily provide the same level of detail.
For optimum security and therefore protect their credit files many consumers seek to freeze with two or even all three of the major bureaus to block access to all the major agencies.
Some companies such as LifeLock, IdentityForce, and Identity Guard provide the three bureaus' monitoring and locking services. The drawback of signing up with their plans is that they can be slightly pricier than a simple lock with one of the bureaus.
A different approach is to access the free locking tools from TransUnion and/or Equifax as an additional measure to the Experian lock. This allows you to freeze all three reports either at no cash charge or the standard fee for the monthly Experian subscription. Just make sure that you are aware that the free locks may be a little more challenging to use as opposed to spending a small amount of money for service.
So, now that you know how Experian IdentityWorks protects your identity, let’s take a look at how you can get started.
If you want easy and unlimited control over your Experian credit report access, follow these steps to get started:
- Go to the Experian IdentityWorks website, or download it onto your mobile device from your app store.
- Select the Premium plan as your choice of plan and opt for the monthly or the annual payment plan.
- Please give us your details so confirm with our records
- Please create a username and a password for your account.
- Two-factor authentication is another layer of security that you can add to your application.
- Enable and activate credit monitoring and locking notify
In a matter of minutes, the access to your Experian credit report is frozen while at the same time, the monitoring that can be beneficial is unlocked. From now on, you can control everything from your online account or mobile app Experian or this application.
Maintaining credit reports is now a crucial aspect of safeguarding in the current world. An Experian IdentityWorks Premium subscription ensures that this is made easy and cheap to lock the Experian file. Combine this with free locks at Equifax and TransUnion for the added security of freezing your credit at all three major bureaus.
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