As you have probably heard, Equifax, one of the three major credit agencies, had a major data breach from the period of May – July 2017 that could impact up to 143 million Americans. The breach included Social Security numbers, addresses, birthdays, and credit card numbers. While you may not have heard of Equifax, there is a good chance they have more than heard of you. They probably have all of your personal credit data. If you have a mobile phone contract, utility bill, auto loan, mortgage, or credit card, your credit was checked with one of the 3 credit agencies. So while Equifax failed at their primary job of protecting the data of its customers, it was kind enough to inform us of the data leak right after it happened. Oh wait, that’s not true either. Instead, they sat on the information for seven weeks and management took the opportunity to sell out of their company stock before the news was announced. Awesome!
Now that Equifax has managed to royally screw things up for us what can we do?
See if your information was exposed: Click on www.equifaxsecurity2017.com. Next click on the Potential Impact tab. You will have to enter the last 6 digits of your social. You will also have the option to sign up for a year’s worth of free credit monitoring service. I guess that was nice of them to do, but seems like we should get free credit monitoring for life at this point.
Since we have already established it may not be the best idea to put our faith in Equifax, what else can be done to protect our credit?
Check Your Credit Reports: First thing is first. Assess the damage that has already been done. Fortunately, this can be done for free through annualcreditreport.com. You can check your credit report to find out if a new account has already been opened in your name.
Monitor Your Credit Cards and Bank Accounts: Check your statements each month to make sure there isn’t aren’t any charges you didn’t authorize.
Freeze Your Credit (The nuclear option): This one is optional because it does cost money and you will need to do it with all three agencies to be work. If you want to really protect yourself though, this is your best bet. Once your credit is frozen, no one an open a new account under your name unless they have a pin number. The downside is, you may need to unfreeze your account for your own credit purposes from time-to-time, so it is more of an administrative burden.
File Your Tax Return as Early as You Can: A common scam as of late is to take someone else’s social security number and file for a tax refund. A fraudster won’t be able to do this if you have already filed your return.
Unfortunately there is likely to be fallout from this for years to come, but in today’s world it’s probably best to be proactive in protecting yourself.