The site is a scam. They probably can’t add millions of users of their poor monitoring service at once, but they wanted people to sign away their right to sue before a class action suit had a chance to inform the people screwed of their rights. Unfortunately it seems to be working.
Regardless, even when they do finally sign you up, they can only offer you their credit report, and they are only one of three bureaus. Irregularities from identity theft and other fraud may never be reported to them. There are better ways to check your credit reports with all three bureaus without signing up for their “free” service. Follow the link in my comment above for advice on how.
The cardinal lesson is that you cannot trust the credit bureaus. They are absolutely not on your side. You aren’t their customer, you’re their product they sell to the financial services industry. I’m not saying that with rancor or hyperbole, it’s simply the way it is.
Also, be sure to use the opt-out of arbitration site or do it yourself, or you may be out of luck for any redress when the inevitable class action begins.
The service they were offering wasn’t to sell you a copy of your your credit report. It’s to monitor activity such as someone trying to get a loan or new credit cards using your information - the information that the breach compromised. Equifax had reportedly recently bought up a company that did just such monitoring, which wasn’t a credit reporting service.
They are just one of many such services around that do that, and I did not enroll in Equifax’s monitoring service or agree to binding arbitration about the results of the breach.
I understand what a credit reporting service does and doesn’t do, and that both
my own state and federal law grants me access to free copies annually from the three main credit reporting services.
It seems like a smart thing to do would be to freeze my credit in a way that allows me to use an assigned PIN to OK additions and changes when I want to make them, and not allowing anyone without that PIN to do so. This is according to Clark Howard, a local news guy who became a big shot consumer advocate.
The reason I made the point about getting different replies for different names and partial socials was because @doctorow was quoting hearsay that the Equifax-linked site “produces the same output no matter what name and SSN you input” - which absolutely did not jibe with my own personal experience.
I feel like you are really trying to be helpful, but don’t really know all of the details - because a lot of inaccurate stuff is being reported about it. But thank you very much for your efforts and please be assured that I’m moving forward cautiously on this.
Ah good. I misunderstood you earlier thinking you had signed up for the their service. I am pleased I was wrong. Clark Howard’s site was the one I linked to above, so you’re way ahead of me there. It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. I would agree that freezing your credit would be a good idea.
I just don’t want people to do something unwise from panic, but totally understand people want to take some action.
I know, I really feel like it’s a bigger than usual Corporate Overlords vs the Little Guys situation. Local Atlanta News had Clark Howard talking about this stuff the day Equifax eventually got around to announcing the breach to the public. When we first moved here 20 years ago I remember thinking “This Clark Howard guy is really good!”
BTW, I had no idea that Clark Howard’s consumer advocacy site was clark.com. That makes it REALLY easy to remember.
I’ve been following him since the late 90’s. Clark is a national treasure IMHO.
Agreed. I harbor some small hope that the public outrage from this will create the motivation with regulators and the industry to move us away from the SSN as a financial identity check. But I might be dreaming there.
The arbitration clause is probably not enforceable.
Credit card charges are dealt with between issuer and cardholder. Can’t wait to see Equifax force Visa and MasterCard into arbitration.
But, you know, nothing like trusting the private sector to do the right thing when yet greater profits come a’calling. In the old days, providing the service competently and profitably was how businesses were managed. Now, obviously not so much. Nor is accountability a thing. And for the Randians: Equifax had essentially a captive market. They could have spent what it took to keep the data safe and still be profitable. Maybe not profitable enough for Wall Street parasites, but profitable.
2) No Waiver Of Rights For This Cyber Security Incident
In response to consumer inquiries, we have made it clear that the arbitration clause and class action waiver included in the Equifax and TrustedID Premier terms of use does not apply to this cybersecurity incident.
