Consumer complaint received 2021-01-25
Company: EQUIFAX, INC.
State: CO
Product: Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports
Sub-product: Credit reporting
Issue: Problem with a credit reporting company's investigation into an existing problem
Sub-issue: Difficulty submitting a dispute or getting information about a dispute over the phone

Complaint:
Equifax has provided extremely poor service in supporting my attempt to use their " Lock and Alert '' option to lock my credit report. 

On XXXX XXXX, I attempted, for the first time, to establish a " Lock and Alert '' account via lockandalert.equifax.com to lock my Equifax credit report. After providing all the information, I was asked four identity validation questions via the website, which I believe I answered accurately, but the website said that additional information would be required. It also instructed me to phone XXXX for help. 

I phoned XXXX in the evening of Sunday, XX/XX/XXXX and was connected to an off-shore XXXX call center. The person representing Equifax at that call center didn't communicate effectively and didn't specify how many credit accounts I needed to verify to gain access. I listed several, both mortgages and credit cards, and afterwards he told me that I failed to validate my identity. 

On Monday, XXXX XXXX, I again tried to get into my " Lock and Alert '' account via lockandalert.equifax.com. Upon entering my email address and password, I received a screen that said " Let 's finish your registration '' and that I needed to " Enter the verification code you received in the mail. '' Since I had not received any such mail ( having only one day elapsed since trying to establish the account ), I again called the XXXX phone number. 

On Monday, XXXX XXXX, when I called the XXXX phone number, the automated greeting again informed me I was being connected to XXXX, and I was connected to an agent. There was much static on the line, and the agent couldn't clearly hear me. When I gave my zip code, they couldn't get more than 3 digits of it. So I said I would hang up and call back. 

On Monday, XX/XX/XXXX, at approximately XXXX EST, I again called XXXX and was connected to the off-shore XXXX  call center and spoke with a new agent to whom I relayed the problem of the phone connection. She said that they had been having problems that morning with their phone system, but we established we could hear each other adequately. After providing my basic contact information, including my email address, she asked me to review an email sent to me. When I clicked on a link in that email, I was taken to a site that said in large red letters " OOPS!!! ", gave an unspecific message that something had gone wrong, and provided a very long numerical reference number ( more than 14 digits ). I provided that phone number to the call center agent, who said they needed to put me on hold for " two minutes ''. I was placed on hold for over 10 minutes, and when the agent returned, they asked if I had received another email message with a PIN. I checked my email, saw two new messages, but neither one contained a PIN. The first was a welcome message to Lock and Alert from a no-reply @ address, the second appeared to be a resend of the same message. Nowhere in the general message was there any information specific to me except my first name in the salutation. I also viewed some email messages that had been sent about 10 minutes earlier that stated, erroneously, that the ( postal ) mail sent to me containing a PIN had been returned. Obviously, there is no way postal mail that was generated on Sunday was returned to the sender by noon the next day. The agent sounded disappointed that I had not received a PIN in the emails ; she checked on something else ; and said that she was going to ask me some credit questions to verify my identity. 

Unfortunately, while this agent was more competent to help me know how many different credit records of each type they wanted me to provide, their phone system apparently failed partway through this process. I had spent approximately 5 minutes providing examples of my credit information, and was finding information to answer her next request, but she stopped responding to my comments. She then started saying about every two or three minutes, " Mr. __XXXX '' are you still there? I responded each time and even pressed digits on the phone and shouted back in hopes that she would hear that I was still there. This went on long enough that I anticipated she would cut off the call at some point, so I dialed into the XXXX number on a different phone ( again identifying itself as XXXX  ) and started letting another agent listen to the first agent saying that they couldn't hear me and ultimately that they were going to have to disconnect the line. ( In total, the call on the first phone lasted about 45 minutes. ) After the agent on the second phone heard this, I asked to be transferred to a supervisor, and ended up being bounced around the Equifax phone system some more. I was transferred to another person, and I immediately asked if they were a supervisor. They replied they were not a supervisor, but were confident they could help me. After telling them that I was trying to validate my identity so that I could use Lock and Alert, they informed me that they were in the department that handled credit freezes but that he couldn't address Lock and Alert. I then asked to speak to his supervisor. He put me on hold a few times, and after each hold of a few minutes came back and said that the supervisor was not yet available. Having eventually tired of this, I asked to be transferred back to the " Lock and Alert '' department. 

Back in the " Lock and Alert '' department, I was again connected to an off-shore XXXX  call agent, where once again, I had to go through not only the entire contact verification process but also the credit-record-based identity verification to in the end get no useful help. After going through the verification process, including with credit records, the agent told me that she would help me reset my password. I reminded her that I didn't need to have my password reset, I knew my password, and that the problem was that I needed to have the account identity verified. She kept saying that what she could help me with was a password resent. I suggested that I try to log into the lockandalert.equifax.com website with my old password to demonstrate to her that wasn't the problem. When I did this, I was then no longer greeted with the requirement to enter a validation PIN, but proceeded to the screen allowing me to lock my Equifax credit report. When I asked this agent what changes she saw that allowed me to do what I wasn't allowed to do an hour previous, she could not provide me any information on the process. When I asked what would happen in the future should I need to reverify my identity, she again fell back on discussing a password reset. I gave up trying to get useful information from phone agents for Equifax, said goodbye, and hung up. 

As a victim of the Equifax hack in 2017, I deserve far more competent help than Equifax is providing, especially via its off-shore XXXX  call center. The CFPB should require that support for credit agency services, especially those being offered as part of compensatory settlements for security breaches, be handled by domestic call centers with properly trained agents rather than ones with phone connection problems, with poor communication skills, and who are reading from a script rather than being knowledgeable about the process. 

I am no fan of excess government regulation, but these credit reporting bureaus should be kept on a much tighter leash and prevented from profiting off of mismanaging my personal data.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation