Consumer complaint received 2023-11-13
Company: EQUIFAX, INC.
State: NJ
Product: Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports
Sub-product: Credit reporting
Issue: Incorrect information on your report
Sub-issue: Information belongs to someone else

Complaint:
Around XX/XX/XXXX I found out that I was the victim of identity theft and quickly moved to freeze all of my bureau reports and lock everything down as much as possible. Luckily nothing serious happened outside of some bogus bank accounts that were opened. 

Since then I have aggressively been monitoring everything through multiple services and each of the credit agencies own websites. Around XX/XX/XXXX I logged into my.equifax.com and found that I was staring at the profile of a completely different person with the same first and last name as myself. They had somehow swapped my Equifax account with someone else despite all of our information being completely different ( and middle initial ). I obviously immediately contacted Equifax since this was a massive breach of personal info and privacy. Their response was to close my account and make me open a new one, which did switch me back to my own info correctly, however upon doing so I found that they had added a " XXXX '' to my name, maybe in an attempt to fix it. 

At the same time I started getting alerts from other credit monitoring services that they could no longer read my Equifax credit report, so obviously things were broken. I spent weeks disputing the " XXXX '' in my name an finally was able to get them to remove it, however my credit monitoring was still broken elsewhere so all they did was hide the " XXXX '' it seems like. 

It's been this way for months, until this week when I logged in and AGAIN they have my account swapped with the same person who has the same name as me. This is twice now in XXXX months. I've contacted them and again they have no explanation and no fix outside of closing my account, which obviously does not stop this from happening again like last time and will cause me to lose my XXXX subscription that is paid for through XXXX. 

To make matters worse, they added a fraud alert on the other persons account with MY phone number and will not change it since I'm not the other person. So now I have someone who I do not know setup for fraud alerts under my cell phone number that can not be changed. It's ridiculous. 

I've requested multiple times that someone over there actually look into the real issue as to why our accounts are getting mixed, but I'm met with no help. This whole thing has been extremely frustrating. I've had XXXX issues with any other agency, but Equifax is consistently causing an issue. It's amazing to me that they just gave me access to someone else 's entire life TWICE and have done nothing to ensure it doesn't happen again. What if I was a scammer or someone looking to commit fraud? I would have this poor man 's entire life in front of me. It's terrible and they need to fix their systems to ensure this doesn't happen again, but instead all they do is close my account. it's a massive breach of trust, PII, and security to keep operating like this.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation