The online instructions I found for reaching a human at Experian didn't work. They seem to purposefully change their menus when it becomes too easy to reach a

The online instructions I found for reaching a human at Experian didn't work. They seem to purposefully change their menus when it becomes too easy to reach a person, as a cost-saving measure. Out of desperation/exasperation, I randomly mashed the phone keypad until I reached a human. I placed a lock on my Experian credit score years ago when I moved overseas with no clear plan to move back to the US. I was living overseas, and read something that a lock only lasts 2 years, so I had the lock PIN sent to a relative and told my relative to just shred the PIN letter. The last I read was that for some states, the lock lasts 2 years, some 7 years, and some indefinitely. In any case, I moved back to the US and my Experian credit was still locked, so I sent a notarized letter from my bank indicating my new address to Experian, in order to initiate re-issuing my PIN. A week or so later, I got an email from Experian saying my address had been updated. I logged in online and saw that Experian then thought that I lived inside my bank! The Experian employee read the bank's address off of the notarized letter, not my address from the body of the letter. There are supposedly 3 ways to reset your Experian PIN: phone, website, and snail mail. The phone system tells you that you actually need to use the website or snail mail. The website, when I gave it my particulars, generated internal errors multiple days in a row, and the error message told me to use the phone or snail mail. They say they'll respond to snail mail within 2 weeks, I think, but it was closer to 6 weeks, by which time I had sent 3 letters and finally resorted to the aforementioned random mashing of the phone keypad. Some executive at Experian clearly heard that Kafka is very popular at many companies now, completely misunderstood, and structured their processes around the complete works of Franz Kafka. I'm totally not surprised that they allow you to just sign up a new account for an existing identity, and when called out on it, claim they have some opaque secret security process that's you know, totally better than not allowing strangers to make duplicate accounts for your identity. Side note: if you move overseas, do your best to keep a US credit card open in the off chance that you move back. Note that you can't even gen a secured credit card issued without a credit check, which is ridiculous. The cash on deposit fully covers the card's maximum balance, so the credit risk to the issuing bank is zero. I had to use my foreign credit cards for my first 2 months in the US while getting my Experian credit lock sorted out. Both Experian and the banks are jointly at fault for that mess.