Equifax was free for the freeze. Tried another and they wanted $10.00. My info was impacted according to website, is it necessary to freeze all 3?

I would think you would not need to freeze the two that were NOT implacted @:-)

Why would you think that? If someone uses your SSN/DOB to apply for a credit card application (AMEX, say) and AMEX usually uses Experian to pull credit reports, what good does it do to have only Equifax frozen?

The idea is to keep people from opening up credit in your name and different banks use different credit reporting agencies to do the credit checks. If you're concerned enough to freeze one, you should be concerned enough to freeze all three.

they being able to charge $$$ for me to freeze is ridiculous. I never gave anyone permission to store my data.

I thought freezing one causes all the others to freeze, but I guess not?

A fraud alert placed upon one is supposed to cause the other two agencies to be notified.

I'm surprised this thread isn't 500 pages long, why does there seem to be so little interest ?

Guess you can only vent so much. And complaining on an Internet chat board won't bring accountability.

I was just thinking the same thing. I've seen posts at r/churning where the poster dismisses a credit freeze because it would interfere with their credit card churning. Identity theft will interfere on much, much grander scale.

I think a lot of people basically have assumed that the info has already been out there for quite a while, not to mention that Hurricane Irma kinda drowned out this news until recently.

Same here,I figured my data would already be used. I just pulled my credit report and it looks fine, not sure how long of a delay before a new card shows up as my new AA card from 12 days ago does not appear to be listed and I pulled all 3 bureaus.

I checked Friday and I can't even sign up until tomorrow.

I think you're right about the huge time lapse already. All we can do is monitor all our accounts (which we do anyway).

It's probably still a good idea to lock one's credit reports, especially if you have some notoriety (or otherwise are more likely to be personally targeted for whatever reason). But if one doesn't, the chance of a criminal pulling your name/SSN/etc. at random out of hundreds of millions of people may be low.

The thing that's really unfortunate, though, is that locking and unlocking one's credit isn't free, with a few exceptions. That might change, however, if Sen. Schatz's letter to Equifax results in the latter reimbursing people for them.

Locking reports vs churning for fun and profit
 

Like a lot of people here, I churn credit cards like mad. It's been highly profitable for me to do so. It wouldn't be practical to lock and unlock my reports constantly, so the choice is to freeze the reports and quit the hobby or to take my chances with the criminals and keep churning as long as I can. I'm going to continue to churn for the time being.

The bolded statement in your post is something I consider relevant. The sheer numbers involved leads me to believe that one has a short window of time to take precautions. I'm not an IT guy - so I have no idea how quickly one can sort 143 million records - but I'd think it would take a while.

That may just be optimistic speculation on my part.