Assuming the cash advance was at an ATM, the type of data that would have been stolen from Equifax wouldn't have been sufficient for that type of fraud.

Was a Western Union transaction.......I've never done a cash advance so dunno how it all works.

Wonder if they keep the tapes / digital files from security cameras that long (since transaction was a few days ago).

And of course if LE is interested in trying to catch the thief.

If it was an in person transaction, they would have likely required a copy of the magnetic stripe data. If it was done online, then it is possible.

Try to lower your cash advance credit limit to $0. Some banks allow it, some don't. If you can, that'll prevent anyone else from doing a cash advance (in the future) on your card, and it won't hurt if you never want to do cash advances yourself.

Slightly off topic, but assuming it was in-person, that does answer the question I had about whether the Verifone PIN pads at Western Union (at least the one by my house) had chip enabled. On the other hand, I guess they could have forced fallback too but considering that you have to talk to someone there to be able to run the card in the first place, that might not be too likely.

+ An issuer would be crazy to allow fallback on a cash advance or cash-like transaction but from my experience with US banks, it wouldn't surprise me

The account activity lists it as an online/mail/telephone transaction.

75% of adults with a credit report are impacted by the Equifax incident. You indeed got it very wrong. However, freezing your credit report, couldn't have stopped what happened to you; the cat was alredy out of the bag.

I'm still curious (though I don't know if we'll ever find out) why not everyone who had credit report data at Equifax was affected. It's not like 25% of people which a credit report have no data at Equifax, because most active account data (though not application data) is reported to all 3 bureaus.

Maybe it was as simple as that it took many weeks for the hackers to retrieve all that data, in many smaller downloads (whether they couldn't download 143 million record that fast, or simply tried to download slower to hide what they were doing), and the hackers got cut off before they got absolutely everyone's records. (Or maybe the hackers were never expecting that much data, and ran out of storage or out of time before they got all the data. ) And Equifax may have an idea at which point they got cut off, but Equifax is not explaining what sequence the data was being stored in or stolen in. It could be the hackers got the accounts most recently updated, most long-ago updated, most recently created, most long-ago created, who knows. They could have been in just about any sequence you could imagine.

I hope I don't sound like I believe in conspiracies, but when you take a company with pretty much no accountability except via lawsuits (something they tried to thwart by giving free monitoring for a year in exchange for arbitration), a company that sits on what may be crucial information for a month, well ..... I know we live in interesting times, but this disturbs me

They were trying to thwart those before their breach too: http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...911-story.html

Justice Dept. now investigating insider trading charges (executives selling stock before the co. went public with breach news). Also, at least two high ranking exec. have left/retired.

Just a DP, it seems BOA has increased security as I had to answer a series of questions after I filled out my application for an Alaska personal card tonight.

Regardless of a crook stealing all my personal info I doubt they would not know these answers as one was a street I lived on 20 years ago and like in the past some of the answers were "none".

Even after answering my app still went pending so I bet I have more hurdles to clear, I see this as a good thing

Managed to do Transunion and Experian just fine. When I go on Equifax and enter my details I get:

Temporarily lift a Security Freeze by Date Range
Temporarily lift a Security Freeze by Specific Party
Temporarily lift a Security Freeze by Multiple Parties
Permanently remove a Security Freeze

But I didn't freeze my account in the first place and don't have a 10 digit PIN! Ugh. The top of the web page says it will let me place a freeze, but that doesn't show up as a link. Ideas?