Are you in the Equifax Data Breach? DO NOT sign up with their website!! – Alabama Credit Reporting Attorney Judson E. Crump

Equifaxsecurity2017.com was created by Equifax in response to the hack.  But asking for their help requires you to waive your rights to sue them.  Don’t fall for it.

When the news broke that Equifax had let the personal information of millions of Americans get stolen by hackers, the giant data company responded by rolling out a new website, equifaxsecurity2017.com, where people are supposed to be able to enter some basic information and determine if their information was exposed.  But the website is a trojan horse: if you sign up for their help protecting yourself from their massive negligence, you have to waive your right to take them to court if it later turns out that they have wrecked your finances.

Attached to the “security” service is an Arbitration Agreement and Class Action waiver.  As everyone knows, arbitration agreements are designed to ensure that no sort of fraud or deceit or illegal conduct will ever be exposed inside of a court room.  Our radically business-friendly Supreme Court has upheld this sort of agreement, even in circumstances where they are grossly unfair and have worked huge injustices to working people.

Yeah.

So basically, when Equifax discovered that it had massively screwed up and put millions of Americans at big financial risk, their first thought wasn’t: “How do we fix this?”

It was: “How do we keep all of these people from coming after us for the damage we’ve caused?”

So they came up with a rather ingenious plan: “We’ll offer a free ‘security’ service and make it look like we’re trying to help, but when people enroll in the service, we’ll bury some nasty legal talk in the fine print that will prevent them from being able to take us to court.”

The definition of a Trojan Horse.

Don’t fall for it.  You don’t need Equifax to tell you if you’ve been breached.  If you’ve had a credit card, auto loan, or mortgage for more than a few years, you can pretty safely assume that you’re affected.

Buy an independent credit monitoring service and go ahead and send the credit bureaus a security freeze request.  This will make it hard for anyone to open fraudulent accounts or debts in your name without personally being present with proof of ID.

And go ahead and reset those passwords.