I must have gotten lucky, as I'm not being flagged as potentially impacted.
I'm not impacted either.
Guess I'm lucky too.
^ Nice to hear there are some people unaffected. Mine, my wife's, my mom, my dad, anyone I talked to at work, etc. all were impacted. On the radio, they were saying they put in a fake name and made up soc # and it turned out "potentially affected" so I was thinking they just told everyone they were affected.
I am not sure which we use but we have the type of credit "protection" where you get an email and some nagging (good nagging) text messages anytime a credit report is run for either of our numbers, its not free but I think its pretty cheap, I'll ask the wife which one we have.
& you would think for the actual credit agency's to get hacked there would be (or hope there will be) some serious fines and or criminal implications for this type activity - I also heard Equifax sat on this news for over a month?
You know free and cheap are two different things to me RG! ;o) I think most credit monitoring works basically the same way. I suspect the free one from Equifax (TrustedID Premier) will function as you describe. It's free to anyone, affected or not (the pr!cks originally offered it at 1/2 price and then when they realized how deep in hot sh!t they are, they made it free).
You are right. These guys (Equifax), along with Experience and Transunion, are the frickin gatekeepers of our personal credit information. To have a breach of this magnitude is absolutely unacceptable and they should be made to pay more than offering free monitoring. They didn't notice it for a few months, and then they didn't come out with it for another month. Shameful. The quantity of info (143,000,000 people!) and the quality of info (you name it... names, socials, current and past addresses, DOB, etc. - basically anything one would need to open credit in your name) is staggering. They say the information that was obtained could haunt you the rest of your life. The perpetrators can sit on the information for 10 or 20 years and then use it to open accounts in your name.
Also not affected but LadyFox was.
Good for you kf. What is LF doing, if anything?
I've heard it suggested *not* to enroll in their free protection "fix" because it absolves you of any sort of action against them in the future, but that's literally the extent of what I heard about it. I got a weird email from
[email protected] that said
Hello,
Your account on My Application has been created. We have generated a password for you:
mydefaultpasswordforlikeeverything
If you did not make this request you can ignore this email.
Which makes me a bit nervous..but I couldn't find anything about that^ being a scam or anything..but Idk what else I can do to keep people out. I monitor my own credit pretty frequently, I would say.
Yikes.
I used to monitor my credit fairly regularly. I would get the free annual report each year and go through a month's worth of disputes (basically disputed everything negative, whether it was true or not) because the onus is on the credit agency to prove the negative part of your report. A lot of banks don't like the hassle, so those bits are removed and it inflates your score. Plus, it's surprising how much crap is added to your report that can adversely affect your credit rating.
I need to do it again just to make sure nothing has happened in the last couple of years.
It's a time-consuming process, but it really helps keep your report clean and your score as high as possible.
https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/10-surefire-steps-to-get-errors-off-credit_reports.php
Good advice. I try to get my 3 free reports each year and go through them. And, yes, disputes work. I have always had excellent credit but about 4-5 years ago I had a minor shin surgery and after I paid what I expected to pay, countless bills came one after another. These were 'out of network' costs. I refused to pay. Some creditors dropped it, some keep hounding me to this day but have not reported to the credit agencies, and several made it to my credit reports. I was able to remove 4 out of 5 of the 'collections' from my three reports. Now I only have one creditor on one of the three reports (Equifax coincidentally) and my score is back up to 750ish. And since it has been a year, I disputed it again 2 weeks ago. Maybe since Equifax is so busy, it will work this time.
That was the response I was getting...so who knows. I figured they have to legally send you something notifying you, so I'll know for sure then. I just checked all mine about the time the breach occurred.
I do believe Equifax said they will be sending letters to all of those affected. 143,000,000 letters? Don't expect that any time soon.
