Equifax hacked

[Cadaverine]

Thanks for the links, Trippy.

Just put a freeze on my accounts.  I was able to do all of them online in about 5 minutes total.  Equifax was free, as were Chexsystems and Innovis.  Experian charged me $3, which is what my state allows, apparently.  Transunion I will need to call because they still are insisting I send them a copy of my dl and ssn card through the mail because they can't seem to sort out some address cock up they made. 

[Abagadro]

Can't decide whether to freak out about this or fall back on the fact that so many were taken that the probability  that my info is actually used is fairly small.

[Brolan]

It happened to a co-worker of mine and basically turned his life into a living hell.  It's been seven years since it happened and he still gets calls and letters from creditors seeking to collect on debts the criminals owe.

[Soln]

https://www.chexsystems.com/

They helpfully have navigation to place a freeze from their landing page.  Equifax and Transunion were not working last night, and Innovis is sending me a snail mail?  Yeah, I did it for all 5.  Pissed because I already had Equifax monitoring.  Switched to Transunion for US (already had it for CDN). 

Unless you've never an unfair and random problem with credit (like a hidden traffic ticket sent to collections), it's hard to understand how shitty it is to try and rebuild your credit score.  And I can't imagine identity theft.  So, yeah freeze+++++ and monitoring.

[Yegolev]

Did they somehow take care of setting all your autopay accounts up with the new card?  If they did that I can almost see it being worth it, because that shit is a pain in the ass.  I can't think of what other legwork is even involved with getting a card replaced.

Unfortunately my wife handled that stuff, so I'll say "I think so".  Mostly because I can't think of what else we would need help with other than that.  There is a large spreadsheet with everything we use the card for; and note that I keep using the singular.  Critical lines are highlighted, while the rest are things like Pandora and SiriusXM.  Still takes an obscene amount of time to manage it after a stolen CC incident.

Of course, after the last time it happened (January?) I changed as many things as possible to Paypal.  This wasn't many things, unfortunately.

[Samwise]

A few years ago I set up a credit card whose sole job is bills -- utilities, Netflix, anything that's a recurring charge and reputable.  Nothing else ever goes on that card, which means it never gets stolen (at least until somebody like PG&E has a breach, which I'm sure is coming any day now since they're running out of other ways to screw their customers).

[Yegolev]

That would be smart but I'm happy to leave the bill management to my better half.