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Equifax Data Breach Was an Unconscionable Mistake
I’ve been waiting for someone else to post about Equifax so I could vent my wrath in a comment, but as I haven’t seen much yet, I can no longer contain myself. I cannot believe that a company charged with holding the most sensitive information about us — information that we neither asked for nor wanted to be held on our behalf — has been breached. The information of half of American adults may have been stolen. Bad enough, but they didn’t even bother to tell us about it for over a month. Never mind their executives selling nearly 2 million dollars in stock in the meanwhile. Never mind the anemic apology from their CEO:
“This is clearly a disappointing event for our company, and one that strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do. I apologize to consumers and our business customers for the concern and frustration this causes.”
This is the type of apology we’ve become accustomed to when someone uses an incorrect gender pronoun, not when the lives of 148 million people are potentially wrecked. My cousin lived through identify theft and it is awful. No doubt Mr. Smith has an army of lawyers and admins who will clean up the mess should his identify be stolen. But for the rest of us, it is time taken away from work and family, hours on the phone, loss of the ability to travel and sometimes worse. I have already had to spend $20 freezing my credit. They’ve offered free credit monitoring for a year (did you hear that identify thieves, you have to wait a year!), after which, no doubt, we’ll be stuck automatically with their $29.99 a month service. But even if it were free for the rest of my life, how can we trust their credit monitoring service? So that will be another $300 per year for the mess they created.
I hope Equifax goes down for this. The money will go to the law firms and not to the victims, but right now, I just want blood. God help me, I may even want Elizabeth Warren.
Thank you for letting me vent. It seems churlish to do so with Irma bearing down on Florida. My prayers to all of you in her path.
Published in General
Interesting. I did this on Saturday. Equifax by that time had removed the fee, but the other two companies required me to pay $10. Some states have forbidden fees but others, mine included, allow it. I wonder if your experience suggests that the other two companies are waiving the fee as well, or whether you lived in a state where the fee didn’t apply.
But if I had known that freezing my credit was an option, I would have done it a long time ago.
Yep: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-freeze-data-1276.php
Ugh. I’m experiencing what others have described as the “denial of service” brought on by an on-slaught of millions of people, like myself, trying to opt-out of the system.
I’ve included links to these “freeze my account” sites, so you may be met with failure as well. I’m also 14 minutes into a call to TransUnion for a credit freeze. You know hold music — same damn song, over and over.
Update —
I started wondering yesterday if maybe the execs at Equifax actually brought about the hack. After all, they recently watched as the CEO of Wells Fargo, together with about every branch manager they had under their thumb, opened up millions of credit card accounts by simply forging the needed customer signatures. And for all that trouble to the consumer base, Wells Fargo got a slap on the hand.
Can you imagine how much money you’d could make utilizing so much personal information as the Equifax folks had?
Now that is an impressive level of hack thinkery.
Yes the agency is guilty of big time negligence. But for credit agencies, what else is new? They continue to remain the only game in town – I doubt anyone was fired at Equifax, when fifty years ago, someone there would have taken a tumble. But in this day and age, the more some executive screws over the American people, the more likely they get promoted.
No, but the CEO received a harsh punishment: he retired with a 90 million dollar compensation package. Poor guy had to forfeit his 3 million dollar bonus though.
Ok, America. IRS + Equifax = ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-oqgIZGhbU