Just like everyone else, we are also dealing with the fallout from the data breach of 143 million people who had personal information with Equifax. It is considered to be one of the biggest breaches ever so if you are not worried, well, you should be.
So what to do?
Equifax is recommending you sign up with their monitoring service which will be free for one year. There was some controversy over whether signing up for that service would exclude you from any class action lawsuit. But that seeems to be settled now and it appears that it would not exclude you. But is that your best course of action and are there any other steps you should take?
Via Doctor of Credit, he published a guide on what to do and I thought he brought up several good tips.
1. Go to ssa.gov and create your account if you haven't already. This is key because if someone got hold of your social security number, they could open the account. So you want to do it first. Logical.
2. Go to irs.gov and do the same thing.
3. Doctor of Credit is skeptical of signing up for the monitoring service from Equifax since they are responsible for the breach. I am in agreement here and am checking out several other free monitoring services.
4. Set up a 90 day fraud alert, but do note that if you apply for a credit card, you will need to deal with the alert.
Of course, you should pull a credit report which you can get free once per year from creditkarma.com and freecreditscore.com They also offer free monitoring services.
Good luck!
