By Alvaro Puig
Consumer Education Specialist, FTC
August 1, 2019 – noon
Last week, we announced that roughly half the people in the country can get benefits under a settlement that the FTC and others reached with Equifax. Now, you can now find out if you were affected by the September 2017 breach and make your claim for benefits.
Start at ftc.gov/Equifax. There, you can use a tool to find out if your information – like your Social Security number (SSN) – was exposed in the breach, learn about benefits, and start your claim to get free credit monitoring and maybe even cash. If your info was exposed in the breach, the settlement will give you up to 10 years of free credit monitoring. That means you’ll get an alert whenever somebody checks your credit history, opens a new loan or credit card in your name, or says a payment is late. So if somebody has, say, your SSN and tries to use it to get a loan, this free credit monitoring service would let you know right away. That’s the kind of information that might make a real difference when you apply for a job, try to rent an apartment, or apply for credit.
And a word on the cash: there are several ways to get reimbursed for the time or money you spent dealing with the after-effects of the breach. Read more at ftc.gov/Equifax, but here’s something to consider. To get paid back for up to ten hours of your time, you just need to say what you were doing for those ten hours.
Check out ftc.gov/Equifaxto learn more, and be sure to file your claim by January 22, 2020.
Wouldn’t you know it? People may have already started putting up fake websites meant to look like the official Equifax settlement claims website. To be sure you’re going to the right place, start at the FTC’s page: ftc.gov/Equifax.
A couple more things to remember. You’ll never have to pay to file a claim for these benefits. And anyone who calls and tries to get you to file a claim is almost certainly a scammer.