How to Check If Your Information Was Stolen in the Equifax Hack

To check if your information was stolen in that Equifax attack you have to attempt to sign up for a year of free credit monitoring through a service called TrustedID Premier that Equifax is providing out of the goodness of their hearts in order to get you subscribed to something you’ll have to pay for eventually:

1. Go here
2. Click on the button that says “Begin Enrollment”
3. Enter the information you’re asked for.

If you’re given a date to enroll in the service your information was possibly stolen, it isn’t very clear if that is a guarantee or not. As over one hundred million accounts worth of data were stolen, it is extremely likely that yours will be too.

If you actually want this service you’ll have to come back to the same site on that day you’re given in order to sign up, because they’re staggering the sign-ups with this shitty enrollment program.

These services can’t really do much to protect you from people using your social security number and other personal information in order to sign up for services like cell phone plans and damaging your credit. The only thing that can actually prevent damage to your credit is getting your credit frozen which then makes doing anything that involves credit a nightmare.

This is an absolutely garbage response from Equifax to anyone affected by this attack. Credit agencies are some of the worst businesses and their executives should all be shot into the sun.

At this point my strategy is to just assume that my social security number is freely available to anyone who wants it and I constantly monitor the credit bureaus to check for any new accounts opened in my name.

The only legitimate place to get a free credit check is through AnnualCreditReport.com. Many other places attempt to sign you up for a monitoring service that also can’t do anything to protect you in the event that your information is stolen. I also use a service called Credit Karma that pulls reports once a month. Their business is to provide you with credit card offers (that you should never sign up for) in exchange for the data. They’re scum too, but at least they’re upfront about what kind of scum they are.