What You Need to Know About the Equifax Hack

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What Took Place

From May through July of this year, Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies, was hacked and an estimated 143 million American consumers sensitive personal information was exposed in a data breach. For most, their name, address, social security numbers, dates of birth and, for some, their driver’s license number.

Credit card numbers for another 209,000 people and additional information included in dispute documents for another 182,000 individuals were also taken. If you know family or friends in the UK or Canada, many of them also had information compromised.

Should I Be Worried?

Ok, so that is what happened, should you be worried? The short answer is yes. Thieves now have the four cornerstones of your financial identity. This information can be very valuable and is likely to be sold on the dark web in the future. You will have no idea as to if, how or when your information will be used. According to experts, it might be years before your name gets into some criminal’s hands and is used to open accounts or to access existing ones. This is a huge amount of data, and it could take a long time for most of it to be utilized by criminals, if ever. Since we don’t know, why take a chance on something that could be so devastating – just ask someone who has had their identity stolen.

Here’s How to Protect Your Information

Do this first: Place a security freeze on your account (at all three credit bureaus).

This will be cumbersome, but once this is done, someone other than you cannot use your information to open new accounts, without your manually entering your pin number. No new creditor will be able to access your credit report. This won’t prevent someone from making charges to existing accounts. There is a charge to freeze your account. It is usually $5 to $10 per reporting service. The fee varies by state.

Next: Monitor your credit reports.

Go to annualcreditreport.com and download your free annual credit check. It is a good idea to check your report on the three major credit agencies. Look your report over for suspicious activity like changes to a credit line or address.

Then: Carefully read your credit card bills.

Many of us just look at the amount owed and write a check or click pay if using online banking. Take the time to look at the individual charges for the foreseeable future to see if there are unusual charges showing up from places or stores you have never been to.

Now That We Have That Covered

Here are three additional things I am recommending all my clients consider.

Be cautious about providing more data to Equifax.
Equifax has added a link on their website to see if you have been hacked. When you go to their website, there is a prominent link that says “Click here to enter, www.equifaxsecurity2017.com.”

There you will be prompted to enter your last name and the last 6 number in your social security number. You will get a message that says you “might have had your data compromised” and a link to sign up for free credit monitoring.

Be very careful about doing this! While there is a message today that says they have changed their policy, folks who signed up already had agreed to waive their right to participate in a class action lawsuit or any lawsuit if they take the credit monitoring service being offered.

They also start to charge a monthly fee once the free period is over. According to their website today, they have changed both of these policies. They have stopped taking a credit card number to initiate the service, and say they have rewritten their terms of service to remove the arbitration clause and class action opt out. Since I have not read the new disclosures, I don’t know what the current one says, but I would encourage you to read it before signing up.

Consider adding an “alert.”

You might want to do this at all three bureaus as well. This is less effective than a freeze, because it only notifies you after your account had been accessed or someone tried to access your account without your permission.

Beware of Phishing Scams!

Usually in the aftermath of something like this, phishing emails blossom. These days they can look very official as if they were coming from your bank or credit card company.  DO NOT CLICK ON LINKS IN THESE EMAILS OR PROVIDE ANY PERSONAL INFO TO EMAILS OR PHONE SOLICITATIONS! Thieves will take advantage of this situation to gain your information or account access, so please be careful.

While it is always important to protect your personal data and information, in light of recent events at Equifax, it is a wakeup call to take additional steps to protect yourself.

This is a crime you do not want to fall prey to. It can take years and hours of your time to clean something like this up once you have been compromised. Take the time now to prevent it from happening in the first place, you definitely want to reduce the odds of dealing with this in the future.
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