Consumer complaint received 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Product: Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports — Credit reporting
Issue: Credit monitoring or identity theft protection services — Didn't receive services that were advertised
Company: EQUIFAX, INC.
State: KY

Complaint narrative:
I recently have had my identity stolen to almost the full amount that it can be. It has left my credit beyond " saving, '' " restoring, '' and most importantly " recovering. '' The fact that ANY of these words are even used to describe actions after having it stolen is reprehensible for the FTC to be using and any of the XXXX credit report bureaus. The fact that I must pay, and I do mean MUST PAY, for any kind of forewarning is inexcusable. I currently have 7 years of free " monitoring '' provided by one of the many lawsuits. They " monitored '' my identity thief submit well over 30 soft inquiries to my credit reports in less than one month 's time and did not think it a red flag. They " monitored '' the subsequent 7 hard inquiries to made following those soft inquiries I can assume they were testing the worthiness of my credit and those best suited to try hard inquiries with and I was not notified. That service is ONLY provided to those who pay at least {$30.00} a month to the credit bureaus. I had enough security laid down of my own accord for the thief to be unable to actually open any lines of credit in my name, so they were only left for wrecking my existing account beyond repair, recovery, and saving. I did ALL laid out by the FTC 's filing system ( which is beyond inadequate as how am I to list over 30 inquiries within XXXX characters? ), my SSN is locked down, I have to get a new driver 's license number at my cost, and my credit is all frozen with 7 year fraud protections. Yet my score of a XXXX before this mess began is NOWHERE TO BE SEEN. It is still below a XXXX. What took me 6 YEARS to build to DESTROYED WITH NO RECOVERY OFFERED ANYWHERE EVEN IF I PAY EXORBITANT MONTHLY FEES, PERIOD. The main reason for me filing a complaint today though is that the bureaus seem to be okay with this. This means more business for them and scaring people into paying for their " monitoring '' services that offer no real protection. If they were in any way serious about the security of our accounts, one would think they would stay up to date and have the latest and greatest security measures in place just for logging into your account on their sites. Apparently, they are too busy with their own heads stuck in a place the sun doesn't shine to have noticed that the 2-step verification process of a code being sent by text to your phone has been exploited and becoming widely known to be compromised. The fact that I can not even set up an authenticator app of XXXX 's or XXXX 's is what is truly frightening and tells me that they are not serious about the security of these accounts because that means less business for them from their paying customers who are able to sign in immediately on the first page you come to with their sites. They have at least made it to where " free '' accounts takes less than 20 clicks to find where we can log in now, so there's that I guess. If these companies are not going to take the security of our accounts seriously, it's time for Congress to quit your petty arguing and actually move to make ALL Americans more secure financially. Because I can say for certainty, once the theft has been done and your credit trashed, THERE IS NO RECOVERY, PERIOD. I'm looking at yet ANOTHER SIX YEARS of grueling credit rebuilding because of this but at least I now have an outlet to tell all about it. I even know where the thief most likely works and how to easily narrow it down to who it could be yet NONE of our agencies are even in the slightest interested in starting an investigation, and the ones who even asked a question further into it, come to find they lack the necessary jurisdiction to really do anything about it. Hang your heads in shame members of Congress, you are my fellow countrymen and you have let me down, you have failed to keep us safe. You seem more worried about installing roadblocks and tearing down institutions designed to help each other while hackers from other countries and within our own will pick us to shreds until there is nothing left by the time you can even agree to stop being the XXXX with the most to prove who is the worst XXXX. By the time you all can come to that conclusion, I just hope we have a country left for you to be an XXXX to. Being in XXXX you are there to help others, as your self proclaimed religion even states. You can ' t even follow those tenets that you proclaim you live by. What a joke the lot of you are to our detriment unfortunately as you rake in obscene amounts of cash. There are those voted in that these words do not apply to but I can count those individuals on one hand and unfortunately not one of them am I able to vote for because I do not live in their constituency. I get the those that argue money is " freedom of speech '' because having more freedom of speech than another is SOMEHOW a thing and a XXXX XXXX  that has to create his own board to certify himself as a XXXX  he's so awful at what he studies to become and none concerned with the lacking of secure measures put into place despite XXXX and XXXX 's tireless efforts to do so this past year. Perhaps next election, we should put them in your place because I can see their efforts and concern in keeping the country that made them who they are safe from all of this. At least they are trying and even though they are facing missteps and hiccups along the way, they are answered by attacks and accusations to the contrary. If it wasn't for those XXXX companies, I would have lost EVERYTHING from these bad actors in the past 6 months. If it wasn't for their security upgrades and warnings to the public which should have been amplified by you I was able to stay ahead and successfully block my identity thief at many points. I just know though that they will gain access to my credit report accounts ; it's only a matter of time with the unsecured log in credentials they currently have. I have made it my mission to get rid of those accounts that refuse to start using the authenticator apps for log in this year. As I see multiple attempts of log ins to my accounts once it has been put in place, I assure you they work. The greatest conundrum I currently face, is how do I rid myself of these XXXX accounts that refuse to secure themselves and hold the most sensitive and complete telling of my information and exactly where to go to further hack into my accounts to date? I can't unless I pay {$30.00} a month for a service I already know what save my accounts to begin with. I recommend to everyone to just freeze your credit today, do not wait for suspicion to do so. By then it will be too late, and very little to be done to help your supposed " recovery. '' That way they will at least have to easily hack your account with the credit bureaus FIRST to turn off the freeze, to then destroy your credit and hopefully the bureaus will take that as a red flag to hopefully warn someone their account has been breached before too much irreversible damage has been done.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation