Equifax fiasco
The digital economy has changed the face of crime. No longer is it necessary for a thief to approach you with a gun to take your money, or to break into your house to steal your goods. Nowadays, a computer hacker who isn’t even on the same continent as you can steal your personal information, set up phony accounts with your Social Security number or credit card information and leave you with the bill for thousands of dollars you didn’t spend, all without leaving his chair.
It is incumbent upon those institutions whom we trust with our personal information to zealously guard it from the hackers and digital thieves. So the idea that Equifax, one of the three major credit monitoring companies in the nation, allowed hackers to access the information of 143 million Americans boggles the mind. The information accessed by the hackers included Social Security numbers, the mother lode for identity theft and one of the hardest ID theft problems to fix. You can cancel and freeze credit card accounts or close bank accounts and reopen new ones, but changing your Social Security number is harder than removing an old tattoo.
Equifax is facing long, expensive litigation. Its case should also spark a federal investigation and possibly more stringent regulations on what financial and credit institutions have to do to protect our personal financial information.
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