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No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

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Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#71
post #20

I will be blunt, and I am very incensed by this. My comments ... https://twitter.com/hpcjoe/status/906549917509980160 This is an extinction level event for Equifax. They need to be disassembled, their stored data destroyed correctly and securely, their negligent officers charged. This isn't an accident. You don't surface 0.134 BILLION bits of PII without some sort of criminal level incompetence. Any organization that…

So a few years back, Equifax bought a company I cofounded. They assisted my former business partner in diverting ~$13 million of the purchase proceeds that were supposed to go to me over to him. Then they helped stonewall the resulting litigation for years. While I am upset on behalf of all affected consumers, mere words cannot adequately express the unbridled joy that I experienced when I found out that they were li…

Did they have a specific reason for screwing you over? It just seems like a lot of effort to go through on their part with no tangible benefit. Sorry if this is too personal a question.

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#72
post #20

I will be blunt, and I am very incensed by this. My comments ... https://twitter.com/hpcjoe/status/906549917509980160 This is an extinction level event for Equifax. They need to be disassembled, their stored data destroyed correctly and securely, their negligent officers charged. This isn't an accident. You don't surface 0.134 BILLION bits of PII without some sort of criminal level incompetence. Any organization that…

Just directing it at Equifax is much too narrow, though. At the very, very least some legislation should come out of this mandating that ALL credit bureaus should allow credit freezes, at any time, for free.

The thing that really incenses me about this whole debacle is the system is designed to benefit from its own incompetence! All these "identity theft solutions" that the big credit bureaus provide are just a way to charge consumers more for a problem that the consumer had nothing to do with in the first place!

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#73
post #65

"New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has hammered Equifax for using language meant to discourage arbitration and is asking Equifax for answers over the data breach. The company has stated since it would not bar consumers from joining breach-related lawsuits." Is anyone else mortified that this is the reality? Where companies are allowed to dictate how much legal privilege we have to seek legal recourse if the…

Welcome to capitalist America!

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#74
This title is patently false. After entering my information in the Equifax incident site, the site claimed that I and my mother were "potentially impacted". However, both my aunt and cousin were NOT "potentially impacted."

While my single experience qualifies as an anecdote, I nullifies this idiotic headline.

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#75

Here is a crazy alternate theory for you guys, which I think fits all the details we have so far. 1. Equifax was never hacked. 2. Equifax accidentally deleted a substantial portion of their database. 3. Come up with a system to get the information they lost back, via a "have I been pwned?" checker. 3a. If you enter your details and they are not in their database, they assume it is one of the persons they deleted, add…

If that was the case, it would be well-known because banks would not be able to get Equifax credit reports on consumers.

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#76
post #24

Just a note: I tried the same thing and was told my information was NOT impacted. I suspect the reason for this might be that I froze my info years ago. In some way they must be screening against people who are frozen, or I got lucky.

I read on Krebs on Security [1] that those who visited the site from a computer got one result, but also got the other when they visited from a mobile phone. Not that this might apply to you, but the results from the equifaxsecurity2017 site do not seem trustable.

Quote from the article:

> In the early hours after the breach announcement, the site was being flagged by various browsers as a phishing threat. In some cases, people visiting the site were told they were not affected, only to find they received a different answer when they checked the site with the same information on their mobile phones.

[1]: https://gixtools.net/2017/09/equifax-breach-response-turns-d...

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#77
post #20

I will be blunt, and I am very incensed by this. My comments ... https://twitter.com/hpcjoe/status/906549917509980160 This is an extinction level event for Equifax. They need to be disassembled, their stored data destroyed correctly and securely, their negligent officers charged. This isn't an accident. You don't surface 0.134 BILLION bits of PII without some sort of criminal level incompetence. Any organization that…

This is a "too big to fail" event. Getting rid of or changing Equifax would disrupt too many other businesses, therefore any wrongdoing of theirs will be waived away and the costs pushed onto consumers.

Equifax were already in the process of having the law rewritten in their favour by the Republican party, at least that might be derailed or delayed for a few years. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/equifax-breach-may-kill-...

There's some claims here about the history of Equifax as a form of legal redlining, but they're a bit hard to substantiate with simple googling: https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/906257077215133696

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#79
post #48

So basically Equifax now is engaging in fraud on massive scale. It needs to be dealt with the same way as we dealt with this company called Arthur Anderson.

Allow them to rebrand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Enron_scandal

Re: No matter what, Equifax may tell you you’ve been impacted by the hack

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all they need is a database of basic consumer info, they could buy that list from one of the other credit reporting agencies and avoid the public scrutiny of themselves and the industry itself.

Why would one of the other two sell it to them?

They do it now. Typically businesses only report credit information to one of the bureaus. They exchange information with each other so information eventually makes it around to all three.
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