difference between z

Difference between Credit Monitoring and Credit Freeze

Difference between Credit Monitoring and Credit Freeze

Difference between Credit Monitoring and Credit Freeze: Credit monitoring and credit freeze are two very reliable services often used by people to protect themselves from online identity theft. Often scammers and criminals use a person’s personal information to gain access to financial benefits. Such benefits may include obtaining credit from banks or even purchasing significant properties on credit. Such crimes when committed are not caught well after the fact thus causing the victims to lose their financial privileges and their good name. To prevent such cases, people often use credit monitoring and credit freeze services.

Credit monitoring is essentially a tracking service that continually monitors a person’s credit reports for any suspicious activity. The smallest of glitches if noticed by the monitoring service will be notified to the user to take the appropriate action. Such suspicious activity can range from any name, addresses or phone number changes made to a person’s account to any large transactions made all of a sudden from the person’s account. All such activity is reported to the user via email or text message.

A Credit Freeze, on the other hand, can put a lock on a person’s credit report that prevents any credit reporting agencies to release. The person is able to freeze his reports until they give permission to release their data. New laws put in place by the U.S. now allow people to protect their credit reports for as long as they wish to do so. Any creditor wishing to access your reports will have to do so after your consent.

Credit Monitoring Vs Credit Freeze

Like any product or service, both credit monitoring and freeze have their pros and cons. While one can get their yearly credit reports yearly from any credit reporting agency, credit monitoring detects the smallest of changes in your credit report and reports them to you as they happen. This can prevent the user timely from any kind of identity theft or any other fraudulent activity. Automated monitoring can save you the hassle of reviewing your credit reports every few months.

A credit freeze, on the other hand, entirely prevents anyone from obtaining your credit reports in the first place. It entirely eliminates the risk of any fraud happening through your credit reports. However, it does create a problem for you and/or your creditor if you wish to apply for a credit of any sorts yourself.

Protecting your identity online can be a difficult feat to accomplish, especially in this age of decreasing privacy. However, there are many other fraud protection and prevention measures one can take to ensure their online safety. One of these measures is validating one’s identity online. A lot of businesses, including banks and financial institutes, have started implementing identity verification measures to ensure their customers’ legitimacy. Therein they use document verification, face verification and age verification to authenticate their customers. Click this link to find out more about fraud prevention measures.

Share this post

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn
Share on email
Email