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The best thing that you can do right now is watch your accounts very carefully. Call your bank and get new cards issued with new numbers. Change your brokerage account password. Make it more difficult for the bad guys.
DO NOT rely on Corporate America or the government to do the right thing for you.
I wouldn't doubt that at all. To freeze your credit and supposedly protect your personal information from hackers will cost you $10. So they are charging you a fee to correct their screw up? That's rich. It should be free. They should be paying YOU for losing your sensitive financial information.
But with a republican congress and WH in power they know they can get away with anything.
Republicans are crooks plain and simple.
I did a credit freeze on all three and was charged nothing. Maybe because I am a NY resident?
Maybe there should be a law that any time any company wants to store our credit information, they should automatically offer us free credit protection at the highest level, not a basic one.
Not for one year after a breach and then ask us to pay $17 a month.
Otherwise don't collect our credit information. If the big three want to do their business, free credit protection should be a part and parcel of doing the business and its expense.
I went to the Equifax website and signed up for their "free monitoring" due to the breach, and after I signed my husband and me up, I was told by the site that our information had "probably been compromised in the breach."So yeah, I guess it had been.
Now I know how my husband's SS number was used about two months ago to open up a fraudulent BofA credit card. We had been notified via mail that his recent application had been approved - well, we knew he hadn't applied for any credit cards so we called BofA and were told that there had already been thousands of dollars of charges on that card. Had to go through the whole fraud reporting thing with them, which was a hassle, and they kept sending us more and more forms to fill out. I swear they were trying their best NOT to chalk this up to fraud, but after several weeks back and forth (we never let up on them) they finally deemed it as a fraudulent account and sent a letter stating we wouldn't be responsible for the charges.
I did a credit freeze on all three and was charged nothing. Maybe because I am a NY resident?
For many states its 10 to freeze, 10 to unfreeze, 10 freeze temporarily, 10 to refreeze, etc., etc. It can add up to hundreds if you need to keep up with it.
We didn't sign up for credit companies to take our info and pass it around. We are already just products to them being used at their whim, and we have to pay them MORE to protect ourselves from their incompetence and being robbed.
Interesting how we just go along with it. I imagine it won't be too difficult to convince people to be chipped.
For many states its 10 to freeze, 10 to unfreeze, 10 freeze temporarily, 10 to refreeze, etc., etc. It can add up to hundreds if you need to keep up with it.
We didn't sign up for credit companies to take our info and pass it around. We are already just products to them being used at their whim, and we have to pay them MORE to protect ourselves from their incompetence and being robbed.
Interesting how we just go along with it. I imagine it won't be too difficult to convince people to be chipped.
You're right it could add up to hundreds but if you don't do this it could cost you thousands along with a lot of headaches (not that this whole thing isn't one big headache already!).
Here's a new twist. The same Equifax site that you put your info in to see if you've been hacked. Well someone just for fun put in Test as their name and 123456 as their SS# and it came up that they "may have been impacted". I tried this with the same results. I'd stay far away from Equifax right now!
Quote:
Earlier, in a tweet from a tipster, we noticed that you can enter some clearly incorrect information into the checker. We entered "Test" as the surname and "123456" as the social security number.
The system validated the entry and said that the person "may have been impacted."
Fraud alerts are good for 90 days. After that, you have to renew them. They are free, however, unlike security freezes in many states. Why on earth it should be free for me in NJ to place a security freeze while people in many states have to pay a fee to do the same thing is beyond me. Lifting the freeze, temporarily or permanently, is not free in NJ, however.
I posted in the Retirement forum that Experian is not allowing me to put a freeze on my husband's account. I got a message that he could not be identified from the information I entered (the SAME information I gave TransUnion and Equifax) and they want me/him to mail or upload a bunch of documents, including a government ID, like a driver's license! NO. Then that license will exist on one of their servers, which I can safely assume is about as safe as the Equifax servers were.
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I tried this with the same results. I'd stay far away from Equifax right now!
