Category: Uncategorized

Credit Reporting Bureau Hacked: What Next?

Two immediate actions will greatly help you — and six more things will happen over the next 6 to 12 months. Immediately, you’ll want to:

1. Take Equifax up on their offer of the free monitoring service.

2. Place a “freeze” on all credit reports on each of the 3 services (yes, you have to pay some of them, but it’s worth it). Also do a freeze on the business-to-business company called Innovis.

Note: If your kids already have a social security number, put a freeze on their credit reports, too. (They shouldn’t have anything in the report except their name, address, and social security number.)

What Next?

Over the next 6 to 12 months, banks, auto financing firms, and landlords will implement more and more bureaucratic requirements to prove your identity.

1. Whenever a bank, brokerage, or insurance company provides 2-factor authentication for web log in, use it. Same for voice biometrics at their call centers.

2. Whenever you get a notice from a bank for a credit card you did not apply for, follow up in 2 calls. First, call the toll-free number and stop the application. Second, get the number for the ID theft department and ask for a 7-year fraud alert on your credit report.

3. Don’t let your drivers license or state ID expire. Make sure you keep it up to date. An expired ID is no longer good enough.

4. Likewise keep your passport up-to-date. If you do not have one, get one. In the US, an expired passport is no longer considered valid ID. The law changed.

5. Make sure you have a copy of your birth certificate. Order one now from the Bureau of Vital Records in your county or state. You’ll need to send a photocopy of your ID.

6. Be prepared for more and more bank/financial documents to require a thumbprint and Medallion Guaranteed Signature (which credit unions cannot provide — only commercial banks).

Image Courtesy of GIPHY

First-Name Basis?

Nothing reveals corporate sloppiness more than addressing customers by a name they do not use. I’m referring to the rampant practice by interactive  voice response (IVR) units and customer call center personnel using the first name datum in all customer interactions. I know many people — including some of the most successful people in the world — who use a nickname or their middle name socially and professionally:

FirstName-PolitenessMan

It’s Larry Ellison, not Lawrence

. . . Mary Kay Ash, not Mary Ash

. . . Zig Ziglar, not Harry Ziglar.

Maybe in the interests of national security, these people use their legal name on airplane tickets and opening banks accounts, but that isn’t the same as giving permission to use that legal first name. Good customer service demands that companies make a note of a person’s preferred name in their data bases. It’s a minimal courtesy.

Also, as the customer, people should be allowed to opt-out of “first-name basis.” Again, it should be very easy to store this option in the data base.

My blessed mother had an interesting approach to this situation. When customer service reps or shop clerks would attempt to address her by her first name she would cheerfully say: “Oh, please feel free to call me Mrs. Minko.” She wasn’t scolding people, just indicating her preference.

>>> Update: On a related note, when it comes to speech-to-text voicemail transcription, an end-user name should be spelled correctly. For example, if a person’s name is spelled Jaymes and the voicemail is being transcribed to text, then the way Jaymes spells the name should be used. Yes, this is an extra step in the speech-to-text process, but it matters.