It sounds like extortion to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the data leak was an intentional move to provide incentive to people to sign up for their credit monitoring services or unfreeze fees.
When a company "pulls" your credit they are not given the report for free. Equifax and the like sell a credit reporting service to banks and other companies who would want to see your credit history. When you freeze your report, reporting agencies are not allowed to sell your report to anyone, at your request, meaning they are losing revenue. The freeze fee makes sense when you realize your report is the product they are selling. "You're not allowing us to make money? Fine, then you need to help make up the difference with a fee." Just like stockbrokers, they are intent on making money both coming and going.
Maybe what we need is an open source blockchain application that keeps track of every event in your credit history, with YOU authorizing every view.
Every time you use credit, you'd be authorizing that creditor to add events to the records for that use, until they mark it paid off. Otherwise, nothing else gets into your history. And you'd be able to comment on any of those events, of course.
Of course, it would also need to support multi factor authentication and keep all data related to that secure. Might be hard to do that, but seems pretty hard in the existing industry.
I'd like to know how I can determine what services have such a hold in place for me.
This is all pretty absurd. Why should we have to pay to not have our credit history disclosed? We should pay when we want to have it disclosed.
Then I would have to pay THREE different companies to not disclose it. Or keep track of which ones won't disclose it.
The European model of you owning your own information is making more and more sense.