gk17

Hi,

I think my social security and personal information has been stolen and used. I have already frozen the three major credit reporting agencies and Innovis if it matters.

I want to place an initial fraud alert for up to a year but have some questions.

1. Can I add and delete the fraud alert as many times as needed? I know I can remove but not sure if there's any limits. I do plan to get more cards and prefer to not have to call in to verify my identity.

2. Is removing the fraud alert immediate? I will remove my credit freezes before applying for cards and plan to do the same for the fraud alerts.

3. Does Innovis really matter much here in terms of applying for credit? I read that I don't even need to remove the Innovis freeze before applying for credit. Does the same apply for the fraud alert where I can just leave it on even when applying for new cards.

Thanks.

tmiw

The credit freeze should already prevent unauthorized use of your credit reports. While it shouldn't hurt things to have a fraud alert as well, it probably won't add anything either.

Also, it shouldn't be necessary to remove the fraud alert before applying for new cards. It's just an indication that lenders should contact you before approval (though I'm not sure how many actually do this). To answer your question, though, it may take a day or two for any removal of freezes or fraud alerts to actually take effect.

ricsue

tmiw

While it may be fairly quick most of the time, it's not guaranteed to be instant.

MASTERNC

I have a DP for this, with both a freeze and a fraud alert.

I wanted to apply for a store card (knew this with the particular purchase I was making), so I unfroze my credit the night before. It took less than 15 minutes to unfreeze all three online. You do have to dig for the links to add/thaw a freeze, though.

I warned the clerk about the fraud alert before starting the application and, sure enough, the response after submitting was to call the credit system. While the clerk was on the phone, the bank called me to confirm my application. About 10 minutes passed between the submission and the call, and the call lasted all of a minute. Within 2 minutes of the call ending, I was approved.

gk17

Thanks for all the replies and data points. I have a lot of cards over the years and rather not have a person reach out to me and possibly review the application manually. I still have a good automatic approval rate and will probably just unfreeze the big three credit agencies when the time comes instead of using a fraud alert.

For the one year fraud alert, are the free credit reports based on calendar year? I have other free credit monitoring services and didn't receive any suspicious alerts yet. I want to review all my credit reports and then pull the free annual free later in the year to make sure everything looks ok. I'll remove the fraud alert afterwards. Is it frowned upon by them if I constantly add and remove the fraud alerts every quarter if I wanted to get new cards?

Thanks

MASTERNC

I don't think a fraud alert requires a manual review at all, but just another step that has to be done for the application to be processed. In my DP, the approval was instantaneous after I confirmed I was the one applying.

gk17

Thanks for the clarification. I'll turn on the fraud alert in that case and just unfreeze my accounts prior to applying for a card.

Many thanks everyone. Greatly appreciated.