Unfortunately, freezing your credit isn't going to help with that. However, I'd like to think that they'd run the guy's prints and realize that the prints the Feds have on file for me (due to signing up for Global Entry) don't match--even if that doesn't happen as often as we'd like.

How many of the 143 million people affected have Global Entry, do you think? How many days in jail are you willing to spend while your local police department figures out how to access Global Entry databases to match your fingerprints? How much in attorney fees are you willing to spend to get the police to even check it?

That would suck.

We need fewer credit bureaus, not more. All it takes is to breach one and your identity and financial data are compromised.

When you have more entities accumulating information about you, it's just more opportunities for hacking.

Congress should be looking to crush Equifax but my guess is that they won't, especially if Equifax has lobbyists.

This morning, some crisis management guy was interviewed on CNBC and he was talking about ways Equifax management could survive.

The point is, not only should the management not survive, the company shouldn't either.

So the last thing we need is more banks enabling this industry.

They have to come up with a different way to evaluate the creditworthiness of people than using the SSN.

How the hell do other countries do it?

You don't hear about hacks of personal financial data in Europe. They may happen but I get the sense that cyber criminals are going for the richest, easiest targets, which is the US.

Doubt the TSA will share their database with any other agency.

Especially not local law enforcement.

I was only referring to my own personal situation. In general, however, a lot more people have fingerprints on file than you'd think. (Anyone working with kids, for example. Or the people caught up in the OPM breach a few years back.)

So I'm in the list, my wife is not. This is messy as I'm not a US Citizen and I have no fixed US address (we use my in laws as a mailing address when needed, but I have no proof I live there such as phone or utility bills). I will likely return to the US at some point and I don't want to turn up to find my credit has been trashed.

If I wanted to sign up for the gold standard of credit monitoring (rather than Equinox's crap one year product), what is the best product?

Does freezing my Equifax actually help? Wouldn't the hacker have all the info to unfreeze it?

That would require extra time and effort. Why bother trying to unfreeze yours when they can just move on to the next account? They have 143 million from which to choose.

It's better not to be the "low hanging fruit", no?

lifelock.com is the only one I'm aware of. Has anyone here signed up yet?

Interesting how Lifelock prices its products.

So you're paying for insurance against loss? If they mess up, they will reimburse you up to whatever amount you signed up for?

Wonder how many times they've had to pay up, whether they drag their feet on payouts, etc.

Lifelock has been hacked - including its CEO. Google it.

First time was back in 2008. They have also been sued a couple times & have paid out mucho $$. That doesn't mean their protection isn't worth the $$. I've never tried so no first hand experience.

I used to spend money on myFICO's monitoring, actually. It was pretty good for a while until it started getting nerfed (presumably to encourage people to purchase their more expensive plans).

Anyway, I think with the credit report freezes and Credit Karma recently adding Equifax, that might be good enough for me.

So, freezing your credit reports prevents that?

I happened to check my Chase Freedom card account today, and someone in the past few days did a cash advance with my card. Called Chase and they will reverse the charge and cash advance fee, and send a new card.

Then went onto the Equifax website, put in my info and got the message that I might have been impacted. Well, fairly obviously, I was.

"Oh what are the chances , won't impact me....." Whoops got that wrong.

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 :confused: 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. :eek:) 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. :eek:

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

How do I freeze Equifax?
 

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?

I tried to sign up for trustedIDpremier...enetred all my personal info (as required) and got a message that they would send me a link via email to sign up and I should be patient as it could be in a few days. However, one week has passed and I still haven't received that email to enroll. Is anyone in the same boat?

Same for me.
Has anyone here received the email yet?

I did not.

In other news, I tried to freeze Equifax online. Form tells me they can't freeze online, need to send in docs via mail. So I did. At the same time as I sent docs to ARS and SageStream, using certified first class mail. Checked the USPS tracker today, mail to ARS and SageStream was delivered today, mail to Equifax is still pending.

Nobody should be allowed to run such an amateur operation. Especially not a company that has access to such an extraordinary amount of personal information. They need to go down, as in disappear off the face of the Earth.

With one of the 3 credit bureaus (I can't remember which one), I too got the message to send forms via regular mail. However, after a couple of hours, I just re-entered the same info. into the web page, and that time, it went through (so I didn't need to send anything via regular mail in the first place!) Luckily, I guessed it was probably a systems issue on their end and it saved me a step of mailing things in.

Separately, Who are what are ARS and Sage Stream?

I haven't. I called the number listed on https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/, where the CS person told me to call 888-548-7878. Of course, the latter is only open until 8pm Central time. :rolleyes:

Fortunately the recorded message also has an email that might work. No guarantees that anyone will respond but it's worth a shot.

I tried a number of times over a couple of days and have always received the same answer. That's why I gave up in the end and sent in the paperwork.

Both are less known credit reporting agencies. ARS is run by Visa and it is very hush hush, it doesn't even have a web site.

SageStream is here: https://www.sagestreamllc.com/security-freeze/

Here's a full list of all the data collection scams I know of that should be frozen:

Experian
Equifax
Transunion
Innovis
SageStream
ARS
ChexSystems

And I'm sure there's more. Sigh.

I was in the same situation. I waited a week and just started over and the next time I got the email the next day and was able to set it up successfully. One note however, I did use a different email the second time around.

I have not got it yet. They said 2-3 days, so far day 6.

I'm attempting to follow the steps here and I found out that the Social Security Administration actually pulls your credit reports to verify your identity as part of creating a mySocialSecurity account. Which it can't do since I froze the major ones. From the CS person I talked to on the phone about this, it sounds like I'd have to go down to a SS office to be able to do that (or unfreeze my credit reports).

Weirdly, the IRS website asked the same sort of identity verification questions (last 8 digits of a credit card number or another loan) and let me create an account without any issues.

i resubmitted my request yesterday and received the email this morning. After the first step of the validation process, their website froze. And now it said that i already registered and wont let me restart. I cannot login since i dont have the password, and i cannot reset the password because that part of theur website is down? They must hired highschool kids to develop their website.