I hope this post gets enough upvotes that it shows up in Google search results to help anyone else looking to freeze their credit.
TLDR: Experian tricks users into signing up for a "free trial" of their fraud alert service. They never send any email confirmation of the trial, or of your membership, and they will never send ANY receipts. And there's no way of looking up your payment history. If you don't catch it on your credit card statement, they will continue to bill you $33/month (almost $400/year).
If you ever look at freezing your credit (to lower the risk of fraudulent activity), you'll get bombarded by Experian sponsored ads or paid "articles" written by their minions to get you to instead sign up for their "fraud alert" service which includes a credit freeze. Somewhere in the fine print, you are actually signing up for a 7 day free trial, and then will be billed $29.99/month plus tax forever after.
The insidious thing about it - which I verified with their customer service people twice - is that they intentionally don't ever email you any information about your membership or any receipts. Any other subscription service at least gives you the option to get a receipt. But by design they don't send any information to you ever about your subscription, they don't even have the ability to send an email about it, it's only buried in the initial web site sign up page.
I was hit by a "subscription bomb" and credit attack over a year ago... basically hackers tried to sign me up for a bunch of credit, and to mask their activity, they also signed my email up for tens of thousands of email list servers. The idea is that you're so overwhelmed with email that you miss the important alerts.
If you're ever in that situation, you panic a bit, so I went to freeze my credit reports, and I probably wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. Experian takes advantage of this by tricking you into signing up for their membership. It's the same type of shenanigans that TurboTax used tricked people who should get free tax filing into paying for a filing.
Experian actually has two different services - the credit freeze is free, but they obscure it by offering another services called "Credit Lock" or "Fraud Alert".
And they WILL NOT provide any refunds. Don't get tricked like I did.
original posted by svenliden to r/personalfinance on Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:07:46 GMT.