I've already had somebody file a tax return in my name plus get a credit card.
Here is the site to check to see if you have been hacked.
Apparently I wasn't hacked. So I've got that going for me.
Thanks for the link. It seems I wasn't impacted, at least as far as they know. But then, why trust their word when they apparently can't keep their confidential information safe?
It's not like if you say that you don't trust them, they will stop keeping track of your private information and selling it to others for profit.
I had a couple of bad charges show up on one of my visa cards last month. Unrelated, right? This is about someone trying to open new accounts with my info? Joke's on them.
Huh. I "may have been impacted." How delightfully euphemistic. Assholes.
They think my info was revealed. Maybe the hackers will feel sorry for me and pay my bills.
So I guess now the people with lousy credit scores finally get to have the last laugh?
My bank keeps shutting off my credit card for unusual activity, but it's all been me just trying to buy things. In one case I did rethink the purchase before reauthorizing it and decided against it, which may have been a bad idea from a credit card standpoint.
This explains the tweet I saw advising people to regularly update their name, address, social security number, and birth dates, and to make them something that's hard to guess.
I'm on the fucked list. But not the good one.
I have a credit card I never use but I keep it so my overall credit utilization is lower, maybe I'll kill it.
11: If I snuck in a letter to my social security number no one would be able to guess it!
The word "Customers" in this NYT headline is irrationally infuriating to me.
I guess if I'm pissed off about this I should just choose never to do business with Equifax again??
2.1 Thanks for the link. I see that I'm not the only one who thinks that site is suspicious (But legitimate!): https://www.pcworld.com/article/3223142/security/equifax-hack-how-to-know-affected-data-breach.html
11: For extra security I'll make it official and change my name legally to PFHO.
It took me way too long to figure out if I was hacked, and apparently I "may have been impacted". I guess I should enroll in one of those identity protection services and monitor my credit card statements closely for a while. I'm inclined to look up Experian or whatever Equifax's competitors are, since, you know, they screwed this up.
Also, Equifax's enhanced protection product's TOS preclude your participating in a class action against Equifax. The terms were last updated 6 September, Equifax knew since July 29.
The business of America is business!
Not that I don't appreciate 2.1, but does anybody else see the problem with "We've just suffered a huge data breach so type your name and social security number into our website"?
So what does the Unfoggetariat recommend if one has alas been haxxored? My other internets are all "OMG we are all doomed", but then my other internets are always like that.
Honestly, anytime anyone talks about a data breach, I immediately have a clear, movie-like visualization of the scenes in The City & The City where the sinister organization shows up and everyone is screaming "BREACH!!! BREACH!!!" in block caps.
Go to the governments free credit report site and look at your credit report. Maybe give it a couple of days. And, if you aren't going to need to borrow money or open a new line of credit, have them but a freeze on you.
In other words, the same as before.
23: I think of myself as a tiny mouse too small for the monsters to even notice.
15, 20: They don't actually ask you for the whole SSN - just last six digits.
The first three digits correspond to where you were born.
If you're from a small state, that means if someone knows where you are born, they only need to guess two or three times to get the whole number if they have the last six.
They're also only asking for your last name, not your full name. On the other hand, my last name is rare and geographically clustered in a certain area. Well, shit.
Also, I've discussed my birthday and full name here before. If I've been hacked, I blame you people.
The way they're handling this is completely ridiculous (6 digits, sketchy URL, poor security website), and the company ought to be completely shut down. In any just world the company would completely disappear. I've been trying to think whether there's an effective lever for complaining. Like if enough people complained to Chase would they stop reporting to equifax?
In any just world the company would completely disappear.
I have some bad news for you on that count.
So aside from credit reporting companies fucking up, then having that be an excuse to then sell you another product to correct their own fuckup, the one company I used (provided as a free benefit at work) is so incompetent the service is probably worse than useless. I wouldn't be surprised if they had their data hacked too.
I signed up last year, decided to pay extra $5/month to have my family covered too. In theory they run monthly scans with your info. Gave them a credit card to pay the $5. Then about 6 months later the credit card expired so I gave them a new one a few months ahead and deleted the old one from my account. They kept charging the old one, and once it expired, said my bill wasn't being paid. Went in and updated again, still kept trying to charge the old one. Eventually they shut off my account, not only my family add-on, but also my account that was supposed to be free in the first place. If a fucking ID MONITORING COMPANY is fraudulently using a card I told them not to use, they're pretty goddamn useless.
Maybe you accidentally signed up for an id monitoring company instead of an ID monitoring company and they are monitoring your base psychological impulses?
This thread inspired me to do one of my annual free credit reports right now. I first picked TransUnion. They couldn't verify my identity. (I wonder if the fact that I changed my name two years ago made it harder, or if I typed something in wrong, but I'm inclined to say that they suck too.) Experian found me and had a lot of information. I'm wondering if I should dispute anything. In particular, they have 10 names for me. One is correct. My old name is not actually on the list anywhere. But it doesn't show someone else blatantly using my name to rack up huge debt, so I guess I'm good for now.
Equifax believes I may have been affected. Goddamnit.
Equifax would like you to be equanimous.
So are you guys signing up for their TrustID bandaid program? Is that what I'm supposed to do, or is it how could I be so dumb as to think I should do that?
I understand they require a class action waiver for that service, so ...
37. Equivalent to calling the ransomware phone number IMO. see 19. This is a problem for large card-issuing banks to solve, or, in a different timeline, possibly government, not individual consumers.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs
Signing up waives your right to class action, apparently. It sounds like freezing your credit, which isn't necessarily free depending on where you live, is the best course. Unless you need new lines of credit.
19 is key - signing up for their stuff is bad, it looks like.
Frankly, with most of the adult US population being affected by this breach, I don't think there's anything sensible to be done on an individual level. Keep checking your credit report on a regular basis (or start if you weren't in that habit).
18 to 27.
I assume you should have some kind of means to check against identity theft. Given the shittiness in this thread, I assume professional services are no better than personally reading your credit card statements carefully and getting your free credit reports as often as you can (at least one annually; to be rigorous, maybe one from each of the three services all at once, or maybe each one four months apart), and probably worse. But one advantage of a professional services is that you don't have to take it upon yourself to check regularly.
19, 40, 42- There's an FAQ that says the waiver applies only to the product you're signing up for, not waiving rights to class action over the security breach. So rest assured, even if you signed up you'll still get your $7.32 settlement check in 2024. (Although I wouldn't put it past them to say one thing in an FAQ while having the actual legal language you agreed to say the exact opposite.)
So, someone noticed that if you enter "Smith" last name and SSN 123456 it says you may have been impacted. I confirmed this by trying "Jones" and 987654 and it also said impacted. Now I'm thinking the whole thing really is a phishing site and I'm fucked because I used it and I have an uncommon last name so it's easy to find other info like my place of birth or address. This is all your fault, Ogged.
47: yeah, I saw that, but probably that's just to buy them time to fully comprehend the breach, without giving you a false assurance. All in all, they keep compounding the fuck up.
I've been trying to think whether there's an effective lever for complaining.
In general the mechanism for keeping the credit reporting agencies accountable is suing them under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. I'm not sure if it covers this sort of thing though.
50- Given all the other times I've encountered the "free trial, then we'll charge you if you forget about it!" behavior that I didn't even consider that unusual.
Related due to bullshit corporate behavior- we're having a dispute with ExpressScripts now because they sent us a wrong medicine and won't take it back and will only give a 50% refund (of our copay- still charging insurance full price so they're still getting 80% of their price.) Turns out their default behavior, WHICH YOU CAN'T TURN OFF, is that when your doctor sends in a new prescription they will automatically send it to you and bill you later. (Fortunately you can turn off auto-refill for subsequent amounts.) The only way to prevent this is to call them after your doctor sends the prescription but before they pack it. In this case the doctor messed up the prescription, and we had no way of knowing that until it arrived- there was no shipment notice from them or notice they had received the prescription and confirming what it was. Isn't it a violation of some law for a company to send you things you didn't approve (even if doctor did) and refuse to refund them?
Last time I was mad at a company (Tmobile) I complained on twitter and threatened to switch carriers and tagged them and they refunded some bad charges. But when I got on twitter there were so many people already saying what shitty company ES is I didn't even see the point of saying anything. Nothing I can really threaten anyway since there is no alternate company to switch to if we want to get the 3-month supply at 2-month cost deal, would have to go month by month at a local pharmacy.
Anyone know where you can donate unneeded medicine? Don't think it has any street value...
51.last: Fire stations will often take old prescriptions in to destroy them. That's not as useful as actually getting it to someone who could use it, but at least it gets it out of the house.
I hate expressscripts SO MUCH but our shitty insurance company won't provide any coverage whatsoever for any prescription medicine obtained anywhere except through expressscripts. The magic of the free market.
There are good people on both sides.
Hot take! Elizabeth Warren engineered the breach to tank the chances of overturning the law. You heard it hear first!!
I just put freezes on my reports at the big three companies, plus two that I'd never heard of until now: Innovis and Chexsystems. I feel like I gave up even more info than what was in the breach, just by filling out so many forms. And of course, every company has slightly different approaches to their forms, some don't even bother blocking out the SSN as you enter it. Equifax's was the worst of course, but they didn't charge me. Which either is good or a sign that they failed to properly do the freeze and I'll have to try again.
Transunion's website failed to process the request and I had to call them. They may have charged me for the website failures too. I'll have to wait to see if the charges are removed before I complain.
None of these companies are showing that they should be trusted with our personal info.
Your PIN for Equifax doesn't happen to start with 090817, does it? And then the last four digits are maybe hhmm of the time you froze it?
Are those freezes useful? I didn't even know you could do that (I am sure I should be ashamed of myself) until I read about in the aftermath of this latest awesomeness. Does it screw up anything downstream? I read on one of the sites that it can interfere with a variety of things, including occasionally buying something with a credit card, but from what I can tell the companies don't want you to freeze your credit report because it makes their life more difficult.
I've had it fetish I twice without problem. My life is possibly too dull to cause a computer to think my credit card was stolen.
If your phone autocorrects freeze to fetish, I can guarantee your life is not too dull.
69. Credit freeze FAQ (from the FTC). Basically it restricts access to your credit report. It costs a little money to do. It means if someone tries to open an account in your name they won't be able to get the credit report and hence will turn it down. If you want credit you can unfreeze the whole thing or just the particular entity you want to get it (you get a PIN that enables you to do this -- one hopes they didn't have that stored in the clear at Equifax). I think unfreezing also costs money. It may take up to three days to happen. Brian Krebs thinks everyone's default state should be to have their credit reports frozen.
Checking my credit report just gets me back to normal.
It appears to be free in NC - one of the first reasonable bits of legislation in this not-godforsaken place. So I guess I'll do it unless cleaning out the garage seduces me away from paperwork. Scylla and Charybdis, forsooth.
Detailed, competent-seeming instructions on how to proceed if someone actually opens an account or takes out a loan in your name. Basically, how to trip their institutional "oh shit, this person actually knows what our legal obligations are" alarms.
70 is the best indictment of capitalism that I've read. There are two related asides that infuriate me- he says how once too many people started doing the legally correct thing the credit agencies got permission to ignore them. He also says, "The system is broken in totality but can work for you specifically if you are patient and determined about it." Essentially the only way for anyone to not get screwed by the system is for there to be a large majority of people too poor/uneducated/lacking in social capital to not get screwed, so that if you can show you're not one of those schlubs you'll get your problem fixed. The concept of a system where everyone is actually given their legal rights is unthinkable.
69: If that means you've moved to my old stomping ground, be sure to tell them to be careful with hearts. My boss wasn't happy with getting federally-shut down just because some other department wasn't reading the labels.
OT: Because they played Family Feud in the nursing home we used for hospice, I associate Steve Harvey with death.
73: I suspect watching Steve Harvey Family Feud would make anyone long for death, so that's probably strategically wise.
And now Drew Carey is living on a farm up state.
Wikipedia says Drew Carey is both still working and never the host of Family Feud. The liberal media is lying again.
Carey hosted Whose Line Is It Anyway?
I guess you would have seen that on Wikipedia.
Jammies' dad loves the fuck out of Family Feud.
Tried to get my report from Equifax and they rejected the request and requiring I do it by mail. It's like a company trying to become the most hated in the world.