Originally Posted by
Diplomatico
Interesting. Can you elaborate a bit?
From my perspective, I think you may be underestimating the time, cost, and hassle involved in eliminating the damage you might incur from someone taking out a mortgage in your name or a home equity loan in your name....or using your SSN to engage in criminal activities.
If there was ever a time to take a "strategic pause" from churning, this would be it.
I just don't see the positive risk/reward ratio. Cheers.
The responses above cover it pretty well. The criminals have had a minimum of five weeks and possibly as many as nine or ten to sell the stolen data again and again and again before anyone was able to put a credit freeze in place. Once the data is out, it's out for good. Criminals could wait patiently and open accounts in your name years from now. So your pause may be an indefinite one. I've received tens of thousands of dollars worth of benefits from churning, so the price of discontinuing the hobby for many years seems very high.
And this may be wishful thinking, but given the sheer number of affected people, I think there will be better tools available soon to respond to attempted identity theft. The politicians and the executives of the credit agencies have had their information stolen too.