What happens when you wake up in the morning and on a whim decide to check whether your information was compromised during the Equifax data breach?
Warning: Rant ahead.
If you’re here for recipes and food stories, skip this post.
Panic Thanks To Equifax
It sets off a flurry of paperwork, including pulling our credit reports and freaking out about questions, such as
According to our records, within the last two years you purchased veterinary insurance for a pet. For which one of the following pets did you purchase insurance?
WTF, I’ve never owned a pet in my whole life except for 3 goldfish when I was 8.
I ended up filling out 2 paper requests for our credit reports because Equifax cannot verify our identities due to my failing all the questions about our auto-loans and consumer credit cards (I have never gotten an auto-loan or opened a store credit card).
Thanks a bunch Equifax for consolidating my data, negligently overlooking cybersecurity practices, and continuing to make me jump through hoops to get my data cleaned up.
This is what happens when I’m the product, not the customer. These data companies couldn’t care less what I think or feel.
Action To Take
It’s not all bad.
I’m so grateful for the wake-up call.
This is a wonderful, albeit pesky, reminder to pull my credit reports and check things are in order rather than waiting until a critical moment, such as applying for a mortgage or making a big purchase, to discover my credit history is blemished due to identity theft.
And hey, I’m simply grateful that I found out in less than 10 days before the free credit freeze expires.
If you haven’t frozen your credit report yet, now’s the time to do it before January 31, 2018: Am I impacted?
