Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transunion isn't working. The automated phone line sends you to a disconnected number. Enabling a freeze online with them does not work and 404's.
It may be time to start calling Senators.
Good one!
Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
71–80 of 125 posts
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#72Honestly, not sure why people are surprised by this. The company is incompetent and not consumer or customer focused by any means.
Their entire operation is optimized to sell products and services to creditors, with no regard for actual consumers. They are a B2B company. They treat their employees poor, and their call center operations are outsourced to third party firms on a cost-basis whom are poorly trained and purely exist to field consumer contacts as required by law, but not actually resolve any issues.
I truly believe credit reporting agencies need to be heavily regulated and operated as a non-profit consumer institution, similar to the BBB.
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#73TL;DR: Equifax phone lines unhelpful for anything. Suggestion, from https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/6yv4gb/off... If you do nothing else, place an initial 90 day fraud alert on your file. This is free and will require lenders to contact you if someone (including yourself) tries to apply for credit. Government info. You only have to do this with one bureau in order for the alert to be placed on all t…
Just 90 days? I'd rather freeze my credit. I already bought a house and a car. I'm done with needing credit for the foreseeable future. Freezing all 4 accounts (including Innovis, which actually seems like the most competent of the bunch) is the ticket for me. https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freeze https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo... https://freeze.transunion.com/sf/securityFreeze/land…
This is great advice and appears to be a good thing to do, but I just feel weird giving equifax money to protect me from fallout of their data breach. It feels like I'm rewarding them for losing my data.
I bet millions of Americans, who are suddenly aware of their vulnerability to credit fraud and learning about these options, are paying for requests and freezes.
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#74Haha, Equifax!
Our system is currently unavailable We are currently unable to add initial 90 day fraud alert or active duty alert to credit file online. Please try again later or click here to print a request form. If you need to install Adobe Acrobat click here
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#75TL;DR: Equifax phone lines unhelpful for anything. Suggestion, from https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/6yv4gb/off... If you do nothing else, place an initial 90 day fraud alert on your file. This is free and will require lenders to contact you if someone (including yourself) tries to apply for credit. Government info. You only have to do this with one bureau in order for the alert to be placed on all t…
I was only able to do transunion and only because I created an account, the others failed numerous times. I hate to do another account giving my information out again but since its likely already compromised whats the worst that could happen?
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#76> I could set up a 90-day fraud alert that would force creditors to call me — at a number of my choosing — before agreeing to open any new accounts in my name. This should be the default, for everyone, for free. If banks don't want to do the bare minimum to verify your identity, the liability for identity theft should be on them and not you.
I'm professionally involved with this, so at this point I'm obligated to say that the following is my personal opinion and in no way representative of my employer. Banks use a lot of information to correlate and verify customer identity. The process is called KYC, Know Your Customer [0]. The problem is that this process relies on exactly the information present in a database like Equifax's. If they did perform verifi…
As I understand it, a large number of KYC requirements were enacted with the Patriot Act following 9/11. You raise the interesting point that this breach undermines these KYC rules. In this interpretation, lax Equifax security could be seen to directly empower terrorists.
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#77If we "as the product" actually want to do something about Equifax we should call our banks and demand that they cancel any contracts they have with Equifax. If enough people do that to make it a national issue, Equifax will at a minimum notice, and possibly go out of business (because no bank will work with them) sending a very strong message to everyone who deals with private data. Anyone know how to start Viral Ac…
> we should call our banks and demand
Consumers are no longer really customers of the banks, either. Their customers are businesses, investment houses and lenders. Sure, they write you a loan, but they really package it up and sell it off to a lending company. Depositors just provide banks with cash assets to invest.
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#78TL;DR: Equifax phone lines unhelpful for anything. Suggestion, from https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/6yv4gb/off... If you do nothing else, place an initial 90 day fraud alert on your file. This is free and will require lenders to contact you if someone (including yourself) tries to apply for credit. Government info. You only have to do this with one bureau in order for the alert to be placed on all t…
Transunion isn't working. The automated phone line sends you to a disconnected number. Enabling a freeze online with them does not work and 404's.
Same issue after entering personal info on application.
These credit agencies have shown how archaic they're operating..
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#79Experian's freeze doesn't even work at the moment due to their JavaScript compiled asset getting cut off (unexpected end of input error): https://i.imgur.com/bOGE2Sh.png
I was just looking at that -- then I headed over to Equifax, entered all my info and then: https://i.imgur.com/NmrRg1V.png
Re: Reported difficulties getting help on Equifax's phone lines
#80I have spent a very large amount of time over the past few years attempting to correct Equifax's record of my information (all to the now-apparent end of reducing noise in the hacker's data). They somehow had my SSN associated with someone else, leading to a few rejected credit applications. Equifax customer service reps are very poorly trained. The singular goal of all Equifax employees with whom I interacted was to…
Obligatory link to patio11's extremely helpful blog post on how to deal with these kinds of issues:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-re...
Rule #1 is never try to fix things over the phone. Do it in writing and keep a record of everything you send and receive.