Equifax Hack: 44% of Americans Had Their SSN, names & birthdate stolen

cbenoi1 said:

-cb

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“Based on what I’ve seen in the past, I would estimate that less than 5 percent of Americans will have new loans, bank accounts, credit cards and other financial accounts taken out by a criminal in their name over their lifetime,” [Gartner Distinguished Analyst Avivah] Litan said. What’s more likely is that stolen information will be used to take over existing accounts, such as banking, brokerage, phone service, and retirement accounts. Call centers and online systems rely on these pieces of information to verify identity when conducting high-risk transactions, such as moving money across accounts or changing the information associated with the account.

“It makes no sense to solely rely on static personally identifiable information to identify an individual a business is engaged with when there is a greater than 50 percent chance that data is in criminal hands,” Litan said.

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nighttimer said:

Hell hath no fury like Elizabeth Warren pissed. Read her letter to Equifax's CEO.

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GeorgeK said:

Apparently my info was compromised

Experian was easy to get a freeze online

Transunion would not let me do it online because they wanted to know the year model of a car that we don't own. We did have one of that model that we traded in a few years ago. Yesterday their phone lines were so garbled that I literally could not tell if I was hearing someone's voice or if it was canned music on hold. This morning I was able to do it via a phone algorithm.

Equifax will not let me institute a freeze unless or until I can tell them the house number of my previous address from 18 years ago. I'm not even sure where to look for that.

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Lyv said:

Ugh. We got ours frozen at all three, but I had to call Experian, and even they don't know why.

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Lyv said:

I can't remember which bureau it was, but one gave us a list of names, using our last name but different first names from ours, and asked if any of those people own property in Florida. I guess it was a trick question since we used to, and our first names were not there, but our last name isn't that uncommon. We answered no anyway and it seemed to work, but what a dumb question. How would I know if anyone with our last name and any of those first names owns property in Florida?

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Rachel77 said:

TransUnion? One of the questions I got was "Which town does this person own property in?", giving my sister's full name. Which was deeply creepy, but from what you've posted, it sounds like they might have just been doing name matches to guess at possible relatives. (Our family name is uncommon, in the sense that anyone with that last name is guaranteed to be related. On the other hand, my great-great grandfather had 19 children, all of whom had multiple children, so there are a lot of us. I guess I'm lucky they picked my sister to ask me about, instead of some relative I've never heard of.)

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