The massive data breach that occurred at credit reporting agency Equifax, between last May and July is a story that is continuing to evolve. If you are one of the approximately 143 million people whose personal information was compromised, you face a serious threat of identity theft. Equifax is offering credit monitoring and other services to the victims of the data breach through its identity protection company, Trusted ID, however, if you read the fine print in the agreement you will find that in order to get the free services you must waive your rights to be a part of any class action against Equifax and must resort to binding arbitration for any claims against Equifax. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has already indicated that he believes that requiring such a waiver in this instance is illegal and he has demanded Equifax to remove the language from the agreement. The agreement does also provide that if you notify Equifax within 30 days of accepting the terms that you wish to opt out of arbitration you can do so, but at the moment, your rights against Equifax are far from clear.
TIPS
So what should you be doing? It will certainly take some intense investigation, but there may well be cause for a class action against Equifax. However, in the meantime your primary concern should be protecting yourself from identity theft and the first thing you should do is get copies of your credit report from each of the credit reporting agencies and review them to see if there is any evidence of identity theft. Regardless of whether you find any such indications, the next thing you should do is put a credit freeze on your credit reports at each of the three major credit reporting agencies.
You can get your free copies of your credit reports by using this link.
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action
Here are links to each of the credit reporting agencies for information about how to put a credit freeze on your credit reports:
