Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims • Hacker News Board

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#201

Post by lonelappde » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

throwawaycert wrote: post #60

codernyc16 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a recent 30 day delinquent payment reduce my credit score by 80 points. And this was because the letter in the mail was mid-delivered. Not that the credit card issuer, nor the credit agencies give two shits. This was after about 5 hours of calls ping-ponging between the two.

Credit scores change constantly. What your 80 point drop told creditors is "This person might not have enough money to pay their bills, or is careless or forgetful.". You are perceived as higher risk because, statistically, you are a higher risk. Those of us who maintain excellent credit do it in part by making sure our money gets where it's supposed to. I check online to make sure payments post, or hand in payments…

> statistically, you

Is an oxymoron. Statistics exist when "you" is unknown.

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#202

Post by lonelappde » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:19 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #142

throwawaycert wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit scores change constantly. What your 80 point drop told creditors is "This person might not have enough money to pay their bills, or is careless or forgetful.". You are perceived as higher risk because, statistically, you are a higher risk. Those of us who maintain excellent credit do it in part by making sure our money gets where it's supposed to. I check online to make sure payments post, or hand in payments…

I was surprised how much they change constantly, for silly things like how much balance you have on your credit cards. My wife & I both have excellent credit scores, and we pay all of our bills in full every month. Nevertheless, I've noticed a ~50 point swing in credit scores from month-to-month, all dependent on whether airline tickets, furniture, or charitable contributions happened to make it onto this month's bil…

You also believe the stock market is nonsense, because valuations fluctuate?

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#203

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:20 AM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #193

acdha wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t credit but the companies issuing loans without doing their due diligence. If they were routinely required to meet the normal levels of legal proof that you signed a contract or were liable for false claims, the entire system would change overnight. The awareness campaigns about identity theft, monitoring, etc. are all a distraction from the companies originating loans trying to shift the cost of the…

The entire model of consumer loans is predicated on everyone else paying extra money to cover defaulters.

It's one thing to price default into the risk of a note (this is cost of business as a lending institution). It's entirely another thing to price in egregious, arguably fraudulent business practices such as not properly verifying who you're lending to.

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#204

Post by throwawaycert » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:21 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #194

throwawaycert wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Committed or were complicit in the fraud and got in too deep to recover from the inevitable crash. This has all been widely and loudly reported on for a decade. There's a reason people are pissed that the executives who ran these institutions into the ground and fucked up the economy were barely prosecuted.

So in addition to the info being valid or the organization evaluating it being too stupid to evaluate it correctly, we also have the possibility that these organizations are involved or complicit in the fraud. Why am I supposed to take it as a given that if these organizations use the info it must be useful, then?

If it's not, they're wasting money for no reason, and someone will come along and do the same thing without giving the credit bureaus any money. They're not actually legally obliged to use credit bureau data. They could just throw money at people in the street and hope they get confused and throw back more.

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#205

Post by jorblumesea » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:22 AM UTC

Does it matter? The alternative, the credit monitoring, was only for 4 years for all 3 credit agencies. 10 years for equifax "monitoring" which is of dubious quality. You know, if you want the same company with atrocious security to tell you when things are going haywire.

This is for a lifetime of possible risk. Not to mention credit monitoring's dubious track record. So your tradeoffs were a meaningless product that would guarantee little in the way of safety and a small amount of money.

At this point, you should have your credit permanently frozen and leave it that way.

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#206

Post by panny » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:22 AM UTC

noodlesUK wrote: post #6

Surely the FTC and Equifax saw this coming? 150m people were included in the breach. Only 31m USD was allocated to give anyone who claimed 125 USD? How on earth did they do this math?

It's very simple. Do you allow a low budget Chinese state sponsored hack to wipe out your country's blue chip company? Do you?

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#207

Post by panny » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #49

We're all supposed to take it as just a fact of life now that we need a monitoring service for a service none of us opted in to. And who runs these monitoring services? Why of course, it's the credit reporting companies! Who else would it be. So not only do they know when fraud is happening to you, but they will happily ruin your life while knowing and charge you for the privilege of knowing this is happening to you.…

>We're all supposed to take it as just a fact of life now that we need a monitoring service

Yes. You do. Until China (in this case) and other nations stop hacking US companies.

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#208

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

harryh wrote: post #132

mceachen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a Standard Car Dealership or Mortgage Lender going to support you redlining an agreement, crossing out the sections you don't like (which include oversharing every and all morsel of data they can fetch from you)? No. The salesperson/CSR is going to be confused, and not even know how to proceed. In none of these cases did I opt in. And I decidedly couldn't opt-out.

Yes, if you want to borrow money, the person loaning you money is generally going to insist that you opt into the system that helps them understand if you are a good credit risk or not. That's not an unfair request on their part. Don't want to participate? Then don't ask for a loan.

> Yes, if you want to borrow money, the person loaning you money is generally going to insist that you opt into the system that helps them understand if you are a good credit risk or not.

That's not really what they care about. They don't even get to choose whether you previously borrowed money only from people who agreed not to report anything to Equifax et al.

What they really want is to be able to inform on you to their competitors as leverage in getting you to do what they want, like pay false charges instead of disputing them because then you refusing to pay them allows them to ding your credit score. Which in turn raises the interest rates on all your existing variable rate debt and can put your whole life into a downward spiral.

Whereas without it, lenders would be more wary to lend money, but that would be true universally. So the result would be that things like housing and education would be more affordable because it wouldn't be so easy for everyone to borrow money and bid up the prices, and people wouldn't be paying such a high percentage of their salary for loan interest.

Which leads to the conclusion that the whole system is corrosive and we would be better off without it.

> Don't want to participate? Then don't ask for a loan.

It's a collective action problem. Everyone is better off if nobody takes a loan to buy a house and then the same people get the same houses but everybody pays less, but if you refuse the loan and the competing buyer doesn't, who gets the house?

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#209

Post by throwawaycert » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

XaoDaoCaoCao wrote: post #188

throwawaycert wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't complicated. You incur a debt, you pay it. If you can't, people aren't going to want to do business with you, and will quite reasonably refuse. You are trying to make everyone else responsible for my finances and I'd damn well thank you to stop, since they're mine .

I understand that clearly. But clearly there are classes of institutions and people who... 1. Make a mockery of prudent allocation of money and get bailed out when their games get messed up 2. Mess up the purchasing power of any money you possess far more than any individual defaults or even class of individual defaults 3. Impose grave and hidden responsibilities on individual borrowers and mass surveillance... They…

What are these "grave and hidden responsibilities" you're talking about? Paying your bills is hardly an obscure pastime.

As for your PS, I don't respond to conspiracy theories.

Re: Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

#210

Post by murat124 » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

These are what Equifax offers:

- $125 cash, or

- Free credit reporting (which is useless in essence)

Though I am affected by the breach, considering the inadequate options Equifax is offering I will choose to keep my rights in case I become a victim of identity theft in the future on account of this breach. I hope it doesn't come to that but you never know and if it does I'll sue Equifax to compensate my losses which is safe to assume will be better than either of the options they offer.

In order to opt-out of this claim and keep your rights, you need to send a letter to Equifax. Last day to do so is Nov 19th, 2019[1]

[1] https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq#q-23