Attorney General Jackley Joins State Attorneys General Request Equifax to Protect Consumers
PIERRE, S.D. – Attorney General Marty Jackley has joined with attorneys general around the country in a letter to Equifax requesting that it disable links for enrollment in fee-based credit monitoring service in the wake of the massive data breach impacting 143 million people.
“This breach affects millions of Americans including thousands of South Dakotans. Consumers, who are at absolutely no fault in this situation, should not have to pay anyone especially Equifax to either monitor or to freeze their credit,” said Jackley.
The investigation was launched as soon as Equifax publicly disclosed the breach. Equifax is offering free credit monitoring services in response to the breach, but the attorneys general today objected to Equifax “seemingly using its own data breach as an opportunity to sell services to breach victims,” they wrote.
“We believe continuing to offer consumers a fee-based service in addition to Equifax’s free monitoring services will serve to only confuse consumers who are already struggling to make decisions on how to best protect themselves in the wake of this massive breach,” the attorneys general wrote. “Selling a fee-based product that competes with Equifax’s own free offer of credit monitoring services to victims of Equifax’s own data breach is unfair, particularly if consumers are not sure if their information was compromised.”
The attorneys general also said that, although Equifax has agreed to waive credit freeze fees for those who would otherwise be subject to them, the other two credit bureaus, Experian and Transunion, continue to charge fees for security freezes. The attorneys general said that Equifax should be taking steps to reimburse consumers who incur these fees to completely freeze their credit.
The attorneys general have also had communications with Equifax expressing concerns about terms of service relative to the free credit monitoring services and the prominence of service enrollment information on Equifax’s Web page. Equifax was responsive to these concerns.
I agree completely with Attorney General Jackley that South Dakotans — who are absolutely not at fault — shouldn’t be asked to pay Equifax for credit monitoring or freezing.
This is kind of like closing the gate after the cows got out.
It was Weeks before Equifax reported the breach. By the time it was made public, our data was bought, traded, compiled, sold a couple of dozen times. Credit monitoring, freezing will only do so much. I would like to say we need to scrub the dark web. But doing that would be like trying to heard cats.
Good point, MC. Equifax suffered a major computer systems breach in March — almost five months before the recent hack (that exposed 143 million U.S. consumers’ personal and financial data). Both hacks appear to involve the same intruders… Hillary blames Russians.
The revelation that Equifax suffered two major incidents in the span of a few months adds to the company’s mounting crisis; the timeline casts suspicion on several “unusual” stock sales by top Equifax executives. If they sold stock knowing that either/both breaches could damage the company, expect charges of insider trading. Trump’s Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation. Two top security execs resigned last week. More will follow.
Didn’t Senator Rounds introduce legislation to defund the CFPB? You know, that government agency that works to protect consumers from predatory and illegal crap like forced arbitration in the case of someone like, oh, say, Equifax from getting sued by people whose data was exposed simply because Equifax FAILED to implement an open source security fix for their Apache servers that would have prevented said breach?
Sorry, Mike. That’s not fighting for South Dakotans. That’s fighting for big finance.