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You’ve applied for a car loan or some other type of loan and were turned down. What’s hap­pened? You thought your credit score was good enough to get a low-interest loan and now you are being told that you may not qual­ify for any loan at all! Faced with the news, all you can think about is how to get credit repair help so you can sort through the con­fus­ing finan­cial maze and get to the bot­tom of this ter­ri­ble mishap asap.

Undoubt­edly, you feel scared, con­fused and per­haps even vic­tim­ized, for it appears your iden­tity has been stolen. After all, you know your credit score should be way bet­ter than aver­age. You have paid off your other loans with only the very rare late pay­ment here and there. Your credit card bal­ances are low and you just paid one of your credit cards com­pletely off.
But you learn there is a mort­gage listed on your credit – one you KNOW you did not obtain. And to make mat­ters worse, just as you start try­ing to sort through the mess, col­lec­tion agen­cies begin calling.

Search­ing for infor­ma­tion on credit report repair, you stum­ble across some­thing very inter­est­ing. It’s some­thing called “freez­ing” and it can help you pro­tect your iden­tity from would-be thieves and ulti­mately pro­tect your credit score.

If you had just known this ear­lier, per­haps you could have side­stepped the inevitable fear and frus­tra­tion that comes along with being turned down for a loan.

What is Freez­ing and How Does it Work?

A credit freeze pre­vents any­one, includ­ing legit­i­mate lenders, from access­ing your credit his­tory. As you may have guessed, few lenders (includ­ing banks and credit card com­pa­nies) will issue credit with­out first see­ing a credit report. This also makes it nearly impos­si­ble for iden­tity to open fraud­u­lent accounts in your name.

This can be a great tool for you to use to pro­tect your iden­tity, espe­cially at a time when access to per­sonal infor­ma­tion, which can include name, date of birth and Social Secu­rity num­ber, are easy to obtain. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that Mas­ter­Card was up against a pub­lic rela­tions night­mare after announc­ing that a com­puter “hacker” may have accessed infor­ma­tion on some 40 mil­lion credit card accounts, leav­ing Mas­ter­Card users reel­ing, fear­ing iden­tity theft and that they had lit­tle or no con­trol over who could view their most pri­vate infor­ma­tion.
This same breach, which involved a pay­ment pro­cess­ing cen­ter, involved 22 mil­lion Visa USA accounts and an unspec­i­fied amount of Amer­i­can Express and Dis­cover cus­tomers, prov­ing that no one’s per­sonal and finan­cial infor­ma­tion is com­pletely safe.

This, the largest breach to date, sparked new inter­est in iden­tity theft and ways to safe guard against it. Even­tu­ally, this served as a cat­a­lyst for more pro­tec­tion against iden­tity theft, includ­ing sev­eral states adopt­ing credit-freeze laws that bar lenders and other busi­nesses from review­ing credit reports.

But this new pro­tec­tion comes with mixed reviews. Crit­ics main­tain that a credit freeze does not pre­vent some­one from using a stolen credit card num­ber to pur­chase items or steal funds. They also believe that a freeze can cre­ate prob­lems for con­sumers. For instance, an indi­vid­ual who has put his or her credit records on ice can’t buy a car, get a new credit card or refi­nance a mort­gage with­out first lift­ing the freeze, which can take sev­eral days.
There’s no room for finan­cial emer­gen­cies here.

 

There is Another Option

While a credit freeze is ulti­mately the best pro­tec­tion, there is a good alter­na­tive. It’s called fraud-alert, and it alerts lenders to ver­ify your iden­tity before issu­ing loans or credit lines of any kind.

This can be a great tool for any­one who believes they’ve fallen prey to iden­tity thieves. All you have to do is file a police report and you can get a fraud-alert for up to seven full years.
With­out evi­dence, such as a police report, you can obtain fraud alert pro­tec­tion for 90 days.

Being Proac­tive: Why Wait Until After You are Victimized?

If you wait until you are vic­tim­ized, you will be faced with the night­mare of clean­ing up your credit from charges and charge-backs you never made. Repair­ing credit, in par­tic­u­lar credit that is yours, yet boasts neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion and low scores because of iden­tity theft, can be daunt­ing at best.

You can place a freeze on your credit his­tory, but because it typ­i­cally takes three busi­ness days to “unfreeze” the pro­tec­tion, you may miss out on a low-interest rate or one-time credit card offer. Here is the list of require­ments you will need in order to freeze your credit report

Weigh­ing the Pros and Cons

There is a rep­utable credit repair ser­vice that you can rely on to help you deter­mine which iden­tity pro­tec­tion solu­tion is best for you and to help you fix bad credit that is cur­rently on your credit report. The credit repair com­pany, Lex­ing­ton Law, will take you by the hand and lead you through every step nec­es­sary to fix bad credit. And, dur­ing this process, you will learn the pros and cons of freez­ing your credit and rely­ing on fraud alerts.

The pro­fes­sion­als at the Lex­ing­ton law firm will help you turn an iden­tify theft credit prob­lem around and pro­vide you with the help you need to put iden­tity theft behind you once and for all, and safe­guard your iden­tity in the future, dra­mat­i­cally decreas­ing the chances of you being vic­tim­ized again. For more infor­ma­tion on hir­ing Lex­ing­ton Law to com­bat iden­tity theft,
click this secu­rity freeze link

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