Why Credit Monitoring Might Not Be Available

It’s always frustrating when something doesn’t work, but understanding the potential causes can help by giving you a sense of how long the issue might persist and whether the problem demands any action on your part. With that in mind, if you are unable to enroll in WalletHub’s 24/7 credit monitoring service, this is likely due to one of the following four reasons:

1. Temporary System Issues: Although this is rare, every technology has its bugs, and it’s possible that such an issue has thrown a kink into our credit monitoring system. Whether the problem originates from WalletHub or our data provider TransUnion, it should be fixed within a matter of days.

2. Internal File Discrepancies: Blame it on corporate complexity, but TransUnion’s credit-report and credit-monitoring departments operate a bit differently, and discrepancies in how they validate and match consumer information could result in you being able to access your credit report but not enroll in credit monitoring. This type of issue is also one of the main causes of credit-score unavailability.

3. Suppressed Credit Report: Certain credit-report information – or even an entire credit report – can be “suppressed” if it is believed to be fraudulent in nature. Suppression is designed to prevent an identity thief’s actions from costing victims, whether in terms of money or missed opportunity, in the event of an undeservedly adverse lending decision. But credit-file suppression also has at least one regrettable unintended consequence. Because suppressed information is essentially stricken from your record, the practice can prevent consumers from obtaining their credit scores or enrolling in 24/7 credit monitoring.If you personally requested the suppression by disputing fraudulent information on your credit report and submitting an Identity Theft Report to one or more of the major credit bureaus, this should come as little surprise. But that’s not to say it’s a matter that should be taken lightly. Without access to credit monitoring, you will have to watch your credit accounts like a hawk for any new evidence of fraud and review one of your credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com every three months to see if any other suspicious records appear.

   Finally, if your file is suppressed and you had nothing to do with it, don’t hesitate to notify TransUnion about the issue, manually review your report for evidence of suspicious activity and take other identity-theft-mitigation steps.

4. Fraud: A credit report that has been marked with a “FraudWarning” tag may be blocked from credit-monitoring enrollment for security reasons. After all, if there’s reason to believe that an identity thief is the one actually trying to sign up, why risk it?That rationale can also apply to what you do next. If you suspect fraud, make sure to review your credit reports for other, more costly issues, contact TransUnion directly and perhaps apply a credit freeze to your report.

Regardless of the exact cause, we apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for using WalletHub. We offer a number of great tools and services in addition to 24/7 monitoring, which we welcome you to try while we work on fixing your enrollment issue.