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Old 09-13-2017, 05:28 PM
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lisarea lisarea is offline
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
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Default Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.

I'd just gotten copies of my credit report and put a fraud alert on my accounts because of a different thing, so I haven't had to do it since. But a couple of notes that might now be out of date.

The annual credit report site wasn't working for Experian, so I had to sign up for an account on their site to do that, and despite opting out of spam, they have been sending me spam every day claiming it is actually vitally important information I need so I'm not allowed to opt out of it. So I changed the email address to a dummy, but it kept coming. I sorely regret giving them my real email address. I plussed it, but that doesn't matter to them.

And when I signed up for the fraud alert over the phone with TransUnion, they forced me to sit through two separate marketing pitches for their "premium" service, and the second one was about five minutes long. That's not an exaggeration.

But whatever you do, do NOT sign up for paid services with these organizations, and don't give them any information that you don't absolutely positively have to. Every little bit of data you hand them is added to their databases, and there's virtually nothing they're not allowed to do with it. Don't help them.

I've been using Abine Blur to generate single use email addresses and things like that, and I wish I'd done so with Experian. I really don't know enough about these things to personally vouch for its security, though. They do grab some of your information themselves, but generally less than most apps do, so I gamble on them rather than on everyone else. I'm not going to tell anyone else it's safe or anything, because I don't know for sure, but I decided it's safe enough for me.
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Thanks, from:
JoeP (09-14-2017), SR71 (09-14-2017), The Man (09-13-2017), Zehava (09-13-2017)
 
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