Big-three credit bureau Equifax has reportedly agreed to pay at least $650 million to settle lawsuits stemming from a 2017 breach that let intruders steal personal and financial data on roughly 148 million Americans. Here’s a brief primer that attempts to break down what this settlement means for you, and what it says about the value of your identity.
Q: What happened?
A: If the terms of the settlement are approved by a court, the Federal Trade Commission says Equifax will be required to spend up to $425 million helping consumers who can demonstrate they were financially harmed by the breach. The company also will provide up to 10 years of free credit monitoring to those who had their data exposed.
Q: What about the rest of the money in the settlement?
A: An as-yet undisclosed amount will go to pay lawyers fees for the plaintiffs.
Q: $650 million seems like a lot. Is that some kind of record?
A: If not, it’s pretty close. The New York Times reported earlier today that it was thought to be the largest settlement ever paid by a company over a data breach, but that statement doesn’t appear anywhere in their current story.
Q: Hang on…148 million affected consumers…out of that $425 million pot that comes to just $2.87 per victim, right?
A: That’s one way of looking at it. But as always, the devil is in the details. You won’t see a penny or any other benefit unless you do something about it, and how much you end up costing the company (within certain limits) is up to you.
The Times reports that the proposed settlement assumes that only around seven million people will sign up for their credit monitoring offers. “If more do, Equifax’s costs for providing it could rise meaningfully,” the story observes.
Q: Okay. What can I do?
A: You can visit www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com, although none of this will be official or on offer until a court approves the settlement.
Q: Uh, that doesn’t look like Equifax’s site…
A: Good eyes! It’s not. It’s run by a third party. But we should probably just be grateful for that; given Equifax’s total dumpster fire of a public response to the breach, the company has shown itself incapable of operating (let alone securing) a properly functioning Web site.
Q: What can I get out of this?
A: In a nutshell, affected consumers are eligible to apply for one or more remedies, including:
–Free credit monitoring: At least three years of credit monitoring via all three major bureaus simultaneously, including Equifax, Experian and Trans Union. The settlement also envisions up to six more years of single bureau monitoring through Experian. Or, if you don’t want to take advantage of the credit monitoring offers, you can opt instead for a $125 cash payment. You can’t get both.
–Reimbursement: …For the time you spent remedying identity theft or misuse of your personal information caused by the breach, or purchasing credit monitoring or credit reports. This is capped at 20 total hours at $25 per hour ($500). Total cash reimbursement payment will not exceed $20,000 per consumer.
–Help with ongoing identity theft issues: Up to seven years of “free assisted identity restoration services.” Again, the existing breach settlement page is light on specifics there.
Q: Does this cover my kids/dependents, too?
A: The FTC says if you were a minor in May 2017 (when Equifax first learned of the breach), you are eligible for a total of 18 years of free credit monitoring.
Q: How do I take advantage of any of these?
A: You can’t yet. The settlement has to be approved first. The settlement Web site says to check back again later. In addition to checking the breach settlement site periodically, consumers can sign up with the FTC to receive email updates about this settlement.
Update: The eligibility site is now active, at this link.
The settlement site said consumers also can call 1-833-759-2982 for more information. Press #2 on your phone’s keypad if you want to skip the 1-minute preamble and get straight into the queue to speak with a real person.
KrebsOnSecurity dialed in to ask for more details on the “free assisted identity restoration services,” and the person who took my call said they’d need to have some basic information about me in order to proceed. He said they needed my name, address and phone number to proceed. I gave him a number and a name, and after checking with someone he came back and said the restoration services would be offered by Equifax, but confirmed that affected consumers would still have to apply for it.
He added that the Equifaxbreachsettlement.com site will soon include a feature that lets visitors check to see if they’re eligible, but also confirmed that just checking eligibility won’t entitle one to any of the above benefits: Consumers will still need to file a claim through the site (when it’s available to do so).
ANALYSIS
We’ll see how this unfolds, but I’ll be amazed if anything related to taking advantage of this settlement is painless. I still can’t even get a free copy of my credit report from Equifax, as I’m entitled to under the law for free each year. I’ve even requested a copy by mail, according to their instructions. So far nothing.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that our questioner is basically right — that this settlement breaks down to about $3 worth of flesh extracted from Equifax for each affected person. The thing is, this figure probably is less than what Equifax makes selling your credit history to potential creditors each year.
In a 2017 story about the Equifax breach, I quoted financial fraud expert Avivah Litan saying the credit bureaus make about $1 every time they sell your credit file to a potential creditor (or identity thief posing as you). According to recent stats from the New York Federal Reserve, there were around 145 million hard credit pulls in the fourth quarter of 2018 (it’s not known how many of those were legitimate or desired).
But there is something you can do to stop Equifax and the other bureaus from profiting this way: Freeze your credit files with them.
A security freeze essentially blocks any potential creditors from being able to view or “pull” your credit file, unless you affirmatively unfreeze or thaw your file beforehand. With a freeze in place on your credit file, ID thieves can apply for credit in your name all they want, but they will not succeed in getting new lines of credit in your name because few if any creditors will extend that credit without first being able to gauge how risky it is to loan to you. And it’s now free for all Americans.
This post explains in detail what’s involved in freezing your files; how to place, thaw or remove a freeze; the limitations of a freeze and potential side effects; and alternatives to freezes.
What’s wrong with just using credit monitoring, you might ask? These services do not prevent thieves from using your identity to open new lines of credit, and from damaging your good name for years to come in the process. The most you can hope for is that credit monitoring services will alert you soon after an ID thief does steal your identity.
If past experience is any teacher, anyone with a freeze on their credit file will need to briefly thaw their file at Equifax before successfully signing up for the service when it’s offered. Since a law mandating free freezes across the land went into effect, all three bureaus have made it significantly easier to place and lift security freezes.
Probably too easy, in fact. Especially for people who had freezes in place before Equifax revamped its freeze portal. Those folks were issued a numeric PIN to lift, thaw or remove a freeze, but Equifax no longer lets those users do any of those things online with just the PIN.
These days, that PIN doesn’t play a role in any freeze or thaw process. To create an account at the MyEquifax portal, one need only supply name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, any phone number (all data points exposed in the Equifax breach, and in any case widely available for sale in the cybercrime underground) and answer 4 multiple-guess questions whose answers are often available in public records or on social media.
And so this is yet another reason why you should freeze your credit: If you don’t sign up as you at MyEquifax, someone else might do it for you.
What else can you do in the meantime? Be wary of any phone calls or emails you didn’t sign up for that invoke this data breach settlement and ask you to provide personal and/or financial information.
And if you haven’t done so lately, go get a free copy of your credit report from annualcreditreport.com; by law all Americans are entitled to a free report from each of the major bureaus annually. You can opt for one report, or all three at once. Either way, make sure to read the report(s) closely and dispute anything that looks amiss.
It has long been my opinion that the big three bureaus are massively stifling innovation and offering consumers so little choice or say in the bargain that’s being made on the backs of their hard work, integrity and honesty. The real question is, if someone or something eventually serves to dis-intermediate the big three and throw the doors wide open to competition, what would the net effect for consumers?
Obviously, there is no way to know for sure, but a company that truly offered to pay consumers anywhere near what their data is actually worth would probably wipe these digital dinosaurs from the face of the earth.
That is, if the banks could get on board. After all, the banks and their various fingers are what drive the credit industry. And these giants don’t move very nimbly. They’re massively hard to turn on the simplest changes. And they’re not known for quickly warming to an entirely new model of doing business (i.e. huge cost investments).
My hometown Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) seems to suggest the $650 million settlement was about half what it should be.
“Americans don’t choose to have companies like Equifax collecting their data – by the nature of their business models, credit bureaus collect your personal information whether you want them to or not. In light of that, the penalties for failing to secure that data should be appropriately steep. While I’m happy to see that customers who have been harmed as a result of Equifax’s shoddy cybersecurity practices will see some compensation, we need structural reforms and increased oversight of credit reporting agencies in order to make sure that this never happens again.”
Sen. Warner sponsored a bill along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) called “The Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act,” which calls for “robust compensation to consumers for stolen data; mandatory penalties on credit reporting agencies (CRAs) for data breaches; and giving the FTC more direct supervisory authority over data security at CRAs.
“Had the bill been in effect prior to the 2017 Equifax breach, the company would have had to pay at least $1.5 billion for their failure to protect Americans’ personal information,” Warner’s statement concludes.
Update, 4:44 pm: Added statement from Sen. Warner.
I don’t usually have dramatic responses to stuff like this, especially this far past the event, but today I have the same reaction I had the day I learned of the breach. The bureau should have been shut down immediately, and it wasn’t. Its lack of alarm at the discovery of the breach, lack of communication to consumers, lack of coordination and ability during the aftermath, and now a lack of humility, awareness, and competence, all make me think it’s a danger to American consumers and should be eliminated.
I totally agree. I am still mad that the people that did not update the software which resulted in the issue to start with, all “retired” with millions of dollars, MILLIONS FOR BEING INCOMPETENT IDIOTS. Explain that!!!
Being rewarded for being incompetent sounds like the majority of government employees. Why should a dinosaur corporation that contributes millions to campaigns and has paid lobbyists be an different?
Where computer link do I use to find out if I my information was hacked? I received noticed that it may have been hacked but never that it was.
What computer link do I use to find out if I my information was hacked? I received noticed that it may have been hacked but never that it was.
So true
Let’s shut Equifax down now!
I hear you, MP. And in agreement 100 percent.
I’ve said publicly that the big three bureaus are massively stifling innovation and offering consumers so little choice or say in the bargain that’s being made on the backs of their hard work, integrity and honesty. The real question is, if someone or something eventually serves to dis-intermediate the big three and throw the doors wide open to competition, what would be the net effect of that on consumers? Would it be bad or good? Obviously, there is no way to know for sure, but a company that truly offered to pay consumers anywhere near what their data is actually worth would probably wipe these companies from the face of the earth and expose them for the dinosaurs they truly are.
That is, if the banks could get on board. After all, the banks and their various fingers are what drive the credit industry. And these giants don’t move very quickly, and they’re massively hard to turn on simple things, let alone adopting an entirely new model of doing business (i.e. huge cost investments).
If banks, lenders, and collections agencies, who make up the bulk of the customers for credit bureaus want greater competition, they’d throw their weight around to create it.
Consumers are not the primary customers of credit bureaus, so they really don’t have any right to dictate what is sufficient competition in the credit reporting marketplace.
What consumers can do, and should, is collectively demand that Congress amend the FCRA to limits how data is stored and who may access that data.
Consumers should also support the repeal of banking laws which limit who can create banks and how they are run. This will open the banking marketplace up to new providers who can offer lending to whom they trust, rather than having to rely on credit bureau information.
(The credit reporting industry got so large and unwieldy because Congress mandated that lenders provide money on objective criteria alone. That created the necessity for credit bureaus to guide lending decisions. Instead of lending officers making decisions on their gut and a borrower’s references, they were forced to use credit bureaus. Eliminate this perverse mandate and the credit bureaus would shrink away).
The solution is not a larger administrative state as your corrupt Senator Warner, who’s taken millions of dollars from lobbyists, wants. Fines have never changed corporate behavior and never will.
Nor is a solution to enlarge the role of the CFPB, as the candidate from Massachusetts wants. That just gives out more lucrative government jobs to your Virginia neighbors.
Careful, your proposed solutions can be worse than the problems.
Remember, the rampant discrimination and racism is the reason “objective” data was required to make credit worthiness decisions. It is still not ideal… but it is a hell of a lot better than credit officers going with their “gut”… which translates into the color of the applicant’s skin.
Joe,
I respect that lending rules were changed in the past to promote fairness and equality in opportunities for people of all backgrounds. But such social engineering doesn’t work.
Individuals who have had less historical opportunity to build wealth (due to discrimination or bad luck or both) also have lower credit scores. (1)
Because objective lending relies almost exclusively on credit scores, debt load, and income level, it inadvertently perpetuates the same lack of opportunities it was meant to alleviate.
There’s some suggestion that social engineering in banking made things worse. When Congress saw that lending didn’t increase in some communities, they forced lenders to lower their lending standards. This was one of the factors for the financial collapse a dozen years ago.
In the aftermath of that, lending tightened up again. And who suffered most by greater reliance for lending by algorithms? Historically disadvantaged people.
This is why I stand by the idea that a return to less banking laws and regulations would be good for everyone.
(1) web search terms: credit score discrimination
Legal protections against discrimination isn’t “social engineering”. It is just a better society.
Yes, even with objective credit scoring, it will of course still disadvantage historically disadvantaged communities.
But that happened anyway with local credit officer’s using their “gut” to make worthiness decisions. Without credit scoring, it was much worse, because not only does a person get judged based on that, but also on appearance.
That argument is a classic example of “It didn’t fix 100% of the problem, therefore we can blame it for perpetuating the problem”.
It fixed a LOT of the problem. And the solution is not to go back just because it didn’t fix everything.
Blaming the housing crisis on “too much regulation” is laughable and a ridiculous attempt by the banking industry to spin.
It was lack of regulation that allowed lenders to make subprime loans, bundle them up, and sell them off. This new type of derivative financial product was born out of cutting existing regulation.
It is not that these disadvantaged, low credit buyers would not get a home loan with more/better regulation… but rather the risk of those sub-prime loans should not be bundled and hidden away.
When someone can take risks, but then pass that risk onto someone else without consequence… of course something like this will happen. That’s what happened…
And that’s the reality of de-regulation.
Again we disagree. Ha ha ha.
The freedom to disagree is great. 😉
I froze my credit at all the bureaus after the equifax breach. I had to do it by mail for one, but I persevered, spending most of a day on the project for my wife and myself. I feel slightly safer, but not much. I am also a victim of the OPM data breach, so I try to take this stuff seriously.
At the beginning of the year I also put on my calendar to check a credit report on annualcreditreport.com every four months, and save the reports generated on my computer, which I recommend to all. Keeping up with these is relatively painless when you plan ahead like this.
I placed a freeze with Transunion online after creating an online account. They automatically notified Equifax and Experian, which was confirmed when I received letters in the mail from both companies. Transunion shows the date the freeze expires. You can then set a reminder to renew the freeze, if you wish.
Sorry, my prior comment was for a Fraud Alert, not a Credit Freeze.
This sum’s it up for me as the article states ” yet undisclosed amount will go to pay lawyers fees “
I previously had frozen all 3 accounts before this breach. Are you saying that I have to go to MyEquifax and do another freeze all over again. Or is my original freeze good? A bit confused here. Please Clarify
I’m sorry if anything was unclear. You are the exact type of reader that needs to understand this. If you froze your file at Equifax before the breach, you were given a PIN that was needed to unfreeze it. Now, Equifax no longer honors those PINs (supposedly unless you call them and speak to an agent). But if you try to thaw your freeze now Equifax’s site makes you sign up for an account at MyEquifax. And the freeze PIN you previously were issued does not come into play in any of that signup process.
My point was, if you don’t already have a MyEquifax account, I can sign up as you and lift your freeze, just by supplying the information I noted in the story.
Please let me know if any of that is unclear.
So, it sounds like they are in breach of whatever agreement they had with the people that trusted them to honor the prior freezing arrangement and the PIN. So we’re supposed to trust Lucy not to pull the football at the last moment THIS TIME.
We also had all our reports, etc., etc., etc., frozen and pins issued after the OPM breach (and others). Following your previous articles on the now dismissed pins, I tried to create my account at Equifax (figured to do the hardest, most painful first) last year. I hit repeated web errors, and had to talk to an assistant. They couldn’t find my file. Repeatedly, couldn’t find it. The excuse….the servers must be undergoing an update.
I have no faith any of these miscreants.
The horse has long been gone, time to burn the barn down.
Sarah:
Has a similar horrendous experience with Equifax (not the other bureaus), after needing to unfreeze for a home loan.
All help was off-shore, they couldn’t do anything but read a script (not blaming them – that was all they were given). They could not give me anyone higher or on-shore. I could not find ANY US phone or contact for them. Never was able to resolve it.
As Brian points out – we’re not their customers. So they don’t care, or put any effort or cost to help us. We’re a nuisance – they just want our information.
Hope Senators Warner and Warren are successful. Too bad about the other two bureaus, who may have better practices, getting lumped in, but an industry improvement is much needed.
Brian – as always, great job! Thanks for all you do.
As a victim of the OPM data breach, I placed a credit freeze on my Equifax and other CRA accounts in 2015. At that time I received a PIN for lifting the freeze.
Upon reading this article today, I went to Equifax & created a MyEquifax account for myself. This was easy to do. No glitches & no knowledge-based questions — should I be worried? When I got to my account dashboard, it showed the freeze as currently active.
Not seeing a way to check on whether or not the 2015 PIN was valid, I ended up using the chat feature. According to the agent I communicated with, the original PIN is still valid:
“It should work just fine.”
The agent said I would have to phone in (gave a link) in order to use the PIN & lift the freeze but there was no need to change the 2015 PIN.
Sooo, is the agent wrong or has Equifax fixed this? Should I change the PIN anyway?
Thanks for any advice.
SC45HI:
Both are correct: you can call in and use your PIN to lift the freeze, but you can *also* use your MyEquifax account to lift it online with NO PIN required.
I can attest to this as I froze my credit following the Equifax disaster and within the last month had to temporarily unfreeze it to allow an employment background check to go through. This required me to create the aforementioned account (without ever entering my PIN) and was then able to unfreeze via the online UI (no PIN required).
So yes, your PIN is still valid via phone calls, but is not required (or ever even asked for) online.
Just more proof that Equifax has no idea what they’re doing.
Brian Krebs wrote: “My point was, if you don’t already have a MyEquifax account, I can sign up as you and lift your freeze, just by supplying the information I noted in the story.”
What?!!! You’re kidding!
Sigh. I lost hope with OPM’s “blunders.” And shouldn’t those of us with compromised SSNs know by now? Surely our government does.
Ever feel like someone is just leaving the backdoor propped open for malicious actors to waltz right out with all our pertinent details?
I just now registered for myEquifax (https://my.equifax.com). Fortunately, it shows my credit line is still frozen. (I paid the nominal fee right after the breach but did not receive a PIN.)
Whew!
Speaking of dumpster fires, why isn’t the now-defanged CFPB overseeing this whole process? That’s supposed to be why they were created. Your tax dollars at rest.
There has been so much infighting about Richard Cordray’s appointment as director of the CFPB, and so many “adjustments” to the Dodd-Frank reform act, that there is probably not as much getting done there as when Cordray was there, and Obama was President. Trump appointees are surely going to be bent toward the anti regulatory spectrum the banks want them to adhere to.
JCitizen, CFPB’s structure was ruled unconstitutional. And it was created to shake down companies (won’t go into why here but you can look it up), not defend the little guy.
By a federal judge in New York in contradiction to an earlier ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C.
Pretty magical how these rulings have only starting taking place with a Republican controlled Supreme Court, a Republican Executive, a Republican obstructed Congress, and a Republican appointee running the CFPB, isn’t it?
I have a hard time taking the word of people whose views are coincidentally aligned with the biggest corporations and banks on the planet. Do you think any of the latter have the consumer’s best interest in mind, particularly when you consider the very story we’re commenting on?
Please.
Or … how about you read the actual case. Go to the primary source to parse the rationale. It’s far better than going about life rubberstamping decisions to ease one’s cognitive load.
The CFPB was not created to oversee anything like this. It’s purely an employment program for bureaucrats.
I helped a friend of mine lodge a complaint at the bureau online, and they were very attentive to his problems – they couldn’t get back to him on email so they called him to clarify the problem. It turned out his case was not related to bank financial topics, so it was outside the purview of the bureau. I’d say whatever they were supposed to be doing at that time was actually taking place. Too bad they weren’t around when Bank of America violated the law in my case in a credit card financing request. I didn’t know they broke the law, but I found out too late after taking a personal finance class in college.
Government, like a broken clock, can do something right for two minutes each day.
Signing up for MyEquifax is even easier than you say. I only needed to supply name, address, d.o.b., social security # and phone. They didn’t even ask the 4 multiple guess questions.
And I signed up for my husband using my cell, not his, so you really only need name, address, d.o.b. and ss #. (All info that was stolen in the 2017 Equifax breach) Plus he has a very common first and last name, and they didn’t ask for a middle name or middle initial.
I would guess that you could even put in a wrong address and still get the freeze lifted.
I had my identity stole! Going through the process of filing paperwork now. I may now know how if happened! Unbelievable! I am pissed!
Well . . . I’d love to see if this affects the myEquifax.com website. I have an account with this, but it stopped allowing me to log in several months ago. Just like that. I get the message that my username/password combo doesn’t work. Updating the password for the username doesn’t make a difference. The call center in the Philippines that you get when you call the number on the site says they’re updating the site and to sit tight. That was two months ago, and I don’t think the call center has a clue.
I really have little confidence in these companies.
I think shutting them down was the only way we were going to get justice for this breach and inexcusable behavior afterward. It would send a message to the other two big players to straighten up too. I may be naive in my beliefs though, as these are world wide organizations!
What further outrages me about this is Equifax’s gall in coming up with a new “service” after their breach to monitor your credit. Charging for monitoring the breach they caused to the unknowing or unwary is outrageous and dishonest and should be penalized.
But that 650 million is that going to be divided up among the 145 million people that were wronged? or is this just another shame for the government to collect more money that isn’t theirs. 145 million peoples s.s.n. adresses. And data, well they al already have that. They (we) want reparations for that.Free credit monitoring, it was not monitored b4. I will not ever pay for credit monitoring. Its the banks that imposed these institutions on us in the first place.
How do I collect my money
After the 2017 breach, I spent hours trying to freeze my credit online. I gave up and finally was able to do a freeze using the automated phone system. Without warning it rapidly gave me a 10 digit PIN and disconnected so I didn’t get the PIN.
After many hours, I finally got through to a customer service rep, who was not trained to do anything except direct callers to their (non-functioning) website. I asked to speak to someone who could help and she said they all had the same info she had, and she had to “politely hang up now.” I insisted on speaking to someone who could help and she said again said she had to hang up (couldn’t keep a call longer than 3 minutes). This went round a few more times, til she said “Ma’am, I am literally a loophole.” Would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so true.
Can’t wait for my $2.87
To have a data breach of this magnitude is just unacceptable. People have enough to do just trying to keep their credit in good standing, then one of the big three credit reporting agencies has a data breach? A massive data breach!!! It’s like everything else in this world…gone to hell in a handbasket.
Do i Qualify?
I’m upset how do I qualify
Man what a clusterfudge all this has been and will continue to be until, hopefully, parties in power change and the new ones start doing some blatantly non consumer-hostile things. Legislating an end to the credit bureaus can’t happen soon enough.
Were Equifax customers in the UK affected?
“Were Equifax customers in the UK affected?”
Yes. About 15 million were potentially at risk but according to Equifax the number of people affected is in the region of 700,000.
The Information Commissioners Office hit them with a £500,000 fine last September (probably the maximum amount allowed).
Here is the Equifax statement about the data breach as it relates to the UK –
https://www.equifax.co.uk/incident.html
Well goody goody.
Free crap from a crap company.
Send me the 125.00
My identity was stolen and I had to freeze all my credit with the 3 credit agencies. I also had to purchase a plan with life lock. How do I know if I am a victim of this security breach?
Equifax, Experian, including Trans Union have allowed breach’s of personal data, sold personal information for profit, refuse to send credit report so I can see what is really going on. Ask them to freeze my credit; for a price they will. ID Theft is Big in Mexizona; seems perfectly fine with the state, part of the United States Of Mexico. Not only have I suffered irreparable harm, costs to try to fix things, my credit rating went down the rat hole. Received letters from Experian, Equifax to the effect of legalese delay, deny, and my claims are deficient. I must provide required documentation to substantiate
Some additional tidbits regarding the ‘settlement’
NYT: “We continue to monitor the Dark Web and identity theft,” Mr. Begor (Equifax CEO) said at a news conference on Monday. “To date, we haven’t seen any instances of the data that was stolen being sold.”
Uh yeah, and if you believe that I’ve got a bridge for sale…
Also:
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-ftc-settlement-equifax-press-conference-statement-kathy-kraninger/
All their assets should have been seized and distributed to their victims. Something like this requires a corporate death penalty.
Why can’t we close Equifax down?
Equifax should be closed down. What do we have to do , to get that accomplished?
My plan is to keep my equifax account locked forever.
Brian,
Your comment about not being able to get a credit report from Equifax may not be what you think. I spent several months trying and finally got another cell phone company that provides credit ratings to contact Equifax for me since I was not getting anywhere. That is the 4th credit reporting agency that you wrote about when this story first broke. I don’t remember the company name but they were great at helping – so Thank You for mentioning them then.
It took a number of emails and phone calls and finally spoke with one of their IT folks to verify my info was correct and should be accepted by their site but wasn’t. Once verified he passed my query on up the line for resolution.
I finally got a copy in the mail and then a phone call from Customer Relations Dept with a half-assed rationale of why I was not able to access my online report.
Wait for it…. My credit was too good. Meaning that we have paid cash for almost every large purchase and despite me using my credit cards on a daily basis for purchase, they considered my account as “Not Active”.
I was told unless I establish a loan or make a large credit purchase that is paid off over time, I will not have an active account that the web site will respond to.
Crazy as it may sound, if you pay cash, you don’t get a credit report from Equifax. The other two credit reporting agencies were not a problem.
Sounds like you may have the same problem…;-)
Eqifax needs to pay me. EVERYONE HAS MY INFO NOW SINCE 2017
>Free credit monitoring: At least three years of credit monitoring via
>all three major bureaus simultaneously, including Equifax, Experian and
>Trans Union.
Can we elect *not* to have free monitoring via Equifax? It was Equifax’ monitoring of everyone that created the problem in the first case.
I do the every 4 month cycle of getting a credit report from one of the 3 agencies. All goes fine except for Equifax. Always fail their 4 qualifying questions. Last few times they were really ambiguous. This time the info presented was not relevant to me but instead to my spouse or granddaughter who uses our address. *Always* have to request the report by mail. Equifax is a company that may do the impossible and overtake Comcast in unpopularity.