You will be mad.
You probably don’t have a contract with Equifax. Your creditors do.
When you apply for a loan, you give creditors permission to:
*1. Obtain your credit file. *2. Update your credit file.
You expect that creditors vet their vendors, don’t you? You assume banks and credit card companies test their vendors' security.
And you expect financial services companies like Equifax to be on the up and up.
But they’re not. None of them. The banks. The credit cards. The credit bureaus. They’re not on the up and up. They’re on the cheap and dirty. They cut corners. They pocket the money and skip the quality checks.
They don’t do their due diligence.
None of them.
Today we learned that Equifax knew its security was garbage long before they originally admitted. In other words, Equifax’s statements of last week were lies.
As a reminder:
** Equifax lost sensitive financial and personal data on 143 MILLION Americans ** Equifax admits your data was compromised in May and June and July ** Equifax admits it concealed its breach until September ** Equifax admits its chief financial officer and other high-ranking managers sold their Equifax shares after the breach was discovered but before the breach was disclosed (insider trading) ** Equifax denies that its executives knew of the breach before they sold their stock (laughable)
It turns out Equifax (and its executives) knew of the breach long before July.
Via Zero Hedge:
Meanwhile, far from keeping the original hack a secret, “in early March **Equifax began notifying a small number of outsiders and banking customers that it had suffered a breach and was bringing in a security firm to help investigate. **The company’s outside counsel, Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding, first engaged Mandiant at about that time. While it’s not clear how long the Mandiant and Equifax security teams conducted that probe, one person said there are indications it began to wrap up in May.”
The revelation of an earlier breach - and one which comes from the press instead of the company itself - will likely raise questions for the company’s executives over whether that investigation was sufficiently thorough or if it was closed too soon, and also why it wasn’t disclosed as part of the Sept. 7 press release.
In early MARCH! Equifax knew they’d lost your data in March!
So, now how dishonest does Equifax look?
In my prior report on Equifax, I introduced you to John Gamble “with your money,” the Equifax CFO. I speculated that Mr. Gamble traded Equifax shares after learning of the breach. (Mr. Gamble has not personally denied it, but Equifax’s PR agency has.)
Now, Zero Hedge has this:
Now, under the new timeline, the insider sales come _several months _after the March breach but before the public had any knowledge of major security issues at one of the country’s three big credit-reporting agencies. **The new timeline is also likely to focus scrutiny on an earlier sale by Gamble of 14,000 shares on May 23. **According to a regulatory filing, which didn’t indicate that the sale was part of a scheduled trading plan, the value of that transaction was $1.91 million, more than twice the size of his Aug. 1 disposal of 6,500 shares for $946,374.
As I wrote in my first report on Equifax, justice requires two things:
*1. Equifax stock goes to zero. *2. Equifax’s customers (the banks and credit companies who gave your data to Equifax) compensate the hell out of you and their other customers.
This story has legs. Share it with our friends.
And ask all your creditors how they intend to compensate you for the loss of your data. It’s really their problem, not yours.