By Daniel Sater – Nationally Recognized Credit Expert and Expert Witness
On September 7th we learned about the hacking of 143,000,000 consumer’s personal credit information. What made it worst is that we learned that it started in mid-May! To make matters even worse, Equifax only discovered the data breach on July 21.
BUT…THERE’S MORE!!
We now know that between the discovery and notifying the public, three executives sold their stock before the stock price dropped. It may be determined that this was an act of insider trading.
Equifax decided to let consumers check to see if their information was part of the hacking. They created a website to check – www.equifaxsecurity2017.com. Hackers who have been known to take advantage of things like this created a website of their own – www.securityequifax2017.com. The bigger problem…EQUIFAX STARTED REFERRING PEOPLE TO THE FAKE SITE!
It Gets Better…NOT
It turns out that the hacking started ever earlier. It seems it started in March not in May. All that time, for 4 months, they didn’t even know the hacking was going on.
I would imagine this might be due, in small part, to their head of cyber security who has two degrees…both in music composition! LOL
The CEO of Equifax decided to “retire”, after the Board of Directors told him that his services were no longer needed. He retires with $18,400,000 pension benefits.
A scheduled hearing with congress on the Equifax data breach never happened since Equifax decided not to show up.
What is Congress Doing About This?
The GOP lawmakers are quietly trying to deregulate the credit bureaus despite the hacking. They want to limit class-action lawsuits and limit damage awards to $500,000 and bar and Punitive Damages from being awarded.
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!!
What You Need to Do
You must be vigilant about your finances.
1. 1 Put a free Fraud Alert on your file at all three credit bureaus
2. 2 Get a free copy of your credit reports at www.AnnualCreditReport.com
3. 3 Sign up for the Equifax free one-year monitoring service. (They no longer bar you from lawsuits or being part of a class-action lawsuit.)
4. 4 If you can’t sleep at night…you can put a Credit Freeze on your file. It will cost you to do this at the other two bureaus. And, yes, you need to protect all three bureaus. This will prevent unauthorized pulling of your credit prior to granting credit by a new lender. If you want to apply for credit, you will need to temporally unblock it at a small addition cost for each credit application. You'll need to call each of the credit bureaus -- Equifax (1-800-349-9960), Experian (1‑888‑397‑3742) and TransUnion (1-888-909-8872)
Scammers will be trying to get you to give up your personal information
They appear to come from trusted sources. Phishing scammers are great mimics and fairly good psychologists.
- · Never fill out and submit forms that appear in the bodies of email messages.
- · Triple-check the address of any website requesting personal information.
- · Beware of requests for information the sender should already have.
If you are a victim of Identity Theft – we can help. We have help many of our clients get back their good names and credit. Call us at 631-465-9565.
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