Coffee heat rising

Equifax

Credit Bureaus, Outrages, Invasion of Privacy, and a Defunct Post Office

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Just got off the phone with Equifax. That took some doing! After waiting two days for their (Filipino? Surely not native speakers of US English) staff to take their places at the credit bureau’s call center, I then had to sit through a good 15 minutes of aggravating, ear-grating Muzak punctuated every 40 seconds with “We value you as a customer” announcements.

No. No, dear Equifax. If you valued your customers, you would pony up enough sub-minimum wage dollars to hire enough Third-World workers to answer the effing phones.

When you finally reach a human, the poor creature sounds like a ‘bot herself: flat and beaten down and soulless.

Equifax sent me a hard-copy snail-mail informing me that someone had changed my address to my ex-husband’s address.

Since I haven’t lived at his house in some 30 years, that was a surprise.

Their call center doesn’t open till 6:00 a.m. our time, meaning I had to start hassling with them right on the dot, since I needed to leave about 9:00 a.m. for a doc’s appointment. Nor did I know whether the number they sent in their annoying letter would even reach a human — usually, these outfits do NOT want you to speak to anyone in their precincts.

Plan B — assuming a phone call got me nowhere, as expected — was to fly directly from the a.m. doctor’s appointment to the credit union, clear across the city, where I would have to beg to talk with the manager (again!!) and ask if she knows a way to reach a person at Equifax. Then charge back here and engage battle.

Mercifully, Equifax let me get through to a near-human (the poor soul!). This means, I assume, that whatever caused them to decide I still live with the ex probably was not someone hacking in with the present PIN: it worked, and the freeze had not been lifted, so presumably no one had changed it.

Thank God I didn’t have to traipse to the credit union in person and beg for help.

No. Instead, now I had to copy two forms of ID including a recent utility bill, write a letter explaining the present fiasco, jump through some more hoops on paper, and snail-mail said package to Equifax. Which of course meant driving to the post office to mail the damn thing. I probably should’ve sent it registered mail.

Naturally, as I’m rushing to get painted, combed, and dressed to dart out of here in time to make the doctor’s appointment, the computer announces its scanner software cannot find the printer/scanner.

Please: give me some more hassle. I love it so!

Shut down and reboot both the printer and the computer. Surprisingly, this works, relieving me of Plan C: go by FedEx on the way to the post office to get the damn private, none-of-their-goddamn-business documents photocopied.

Print and package all this crap just in time to shoot out the door and hit the freeways.

First, since miraculously I was running about 10 minutes early, I figured I’d drop the envelope of nuisance junk into the USPS mail box over on the other side of Conduit of Blight. This post office is close enough to be within walking distance, if you don’t mind taking your life in your hands. I used to walk over there when I had a German shepherd in tow…but of course would never think of it these days.

Well, thanks to the focking Blightrail, at that hour I cannot get across Conduit of Blight! The signal is red, and it stays red. After about four minutes of sitting there — it’s now time for me to get going if I’m to arrive in the Mayo’s precincts in time for the vaunted appointment — I give up, hang a right, and head to points east and north.

So I figure there’ll be a mail box on the large campus of the Mayo’s specialty office buildings. Or a mail drop inside one of the three huge buildings.

Not so much.

Okay. So I need to go to the Fry’s at Tatum & Shea, a huge intersection enveloped in commerce. There’ll be a mail box in one of the parking lots.

Not so much.

On the way down there from the Mayo — a jaunt of several miles on busy main drags — I see one (count it, 1) mail box. It’s placed at the edge of a bus pullout, where you daren’t even think of parking your car, getting out, walking over to it, and dropping in a letter.

Okay, I know of two other post offices, neither of which requires me to cross Conduit of Blight Blvd. One is down in the tony Biltmore District. Reaching that one will mean I have to drive almost down to Camelback Road, way, way, way out of my way. There’s nothing else to call me in that direction: groceries are shopped for, I’m on the wagon — so no Total Wine — and I couldn’t afford to shop at Biltmore Fashion Square today even if I wanted to. The other one is in SunnySlop, home of our reigning meth gang and its various hangers-on, but over in a better part of the former suburb (now one large, tired, arguably historic central-city tear-down candidate).

[Do not miss that link. Or the one to the hilariously famed El Cid Castle. Ah, Arizona…what a place!]

Okay, so… Well, the PO in Sunnyslop is a little out of my way, but really only three miles from my house. In 110-degree heat, six miles round trip is not walking distance, but neither does it involve a ten-minute wait to get across the damned train tracks or a drive past a hobo jungle. Okay.

So the letter is mailed. But when you consider how far I drove to the doctor’s office and then the grocery store — about 23 miles one-way — and there was not one US Post Office in all those miles????? Holy shit.

Remember when there was a postbox on almost every corner? Back in the Day, you never had to traipse from pillar to post to find a place to send your mail.

What a Brave New World…

Prospero and Miranda (William Maw Egley)

Fun & Games with Equifax

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Amazing. A hundred and forty-three million people get all their private financial information stolen from Equifax, an organization that snoops into your business and accrues data about you without your permission — without encrypting said data. Adding to this latest entry in the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted, Equifax executives knew what was coming down the pike, so sold their stock in the company before the news hit the street.

So. If your personal information hasn’t already been stolen, chances are pretty good it’s gone now: 143 million is one in two Americans who may be a victim of this latest heist. What can you do?

You’re not helpless, interestingly enough: there are several strategies that will help protect against the effects of identity theft.

• Freeze your credit bureau accounts. You have to call all three credit bureaus to have each one apply a freeze. It ensures that no one — including you — can set up a new bank account, credit card, mortgage, or the like without your knowing about it.

This is probably the best move you can make. It does add some hassle to your life. Any time you want to take out a loan or open a new bank account, you have to un-freeze at least one account — usually Experian. This is made slightly less inconvenient by the fact that you can limit the period that it’s unfrozen, having it refreeze after x number of days. Which sounds good until you realize that you have no way of getting the people your dealing with off the dime: invariably, they don’t get around to asking for a credit report until after the un-frozen period ends.

• Monitor your credit card and bank account statements. You should be doing this anyway, but now that’s even more true. Check each statement promptly after it arrives for any transactions you don’t recognize, and if you suspect fraud, call the card issuer or bank immediately.

• Set up fraud monitoring on your accounts. Equifax proposes to give its victims a year of free fraud monitoring — conveniently, through its own subsidiary.

This is problematic. First, one year of monitoring ain’t much. If bad guys have your Social Security number, you don’t have a year-long problem: your problem is going to last the rest of your life. After that year, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. And second, if you sign up for the service offered by Equifax, you have to give up your right to sue the bastards — or to be part of a class action suit.

There is some wrong-doing here: they knew about this on July 29, plenty of time for the higher-ups to unload stock. We proles didn’t learn that our personal data was on the way to the Dark Web until yesterday. So no: you do not want to forego your right to sue, and no: you do not want to agree to accept arbitration.

Paid identity fraud monitoring is probably unnecessary. You can accomplish the same thing for free or for very little by freezing your credit bureau accounts, keeping a sharp eye on your financial statements, and also checking the EOB (explanation of benefits) statements that come from your health insurer for any treatments you didn’t receive.

• For free, you can monitor your credit reports. By law, credit bureaus are required to give you one free credit report a year. Since three credit bureaus dominate the privacy-invasion landscape, you can arrange to stagger requests for reports, so that one comes in every four months, giving you a recurring view of activities reported to the credit bureaus.

The federal government has a free identity theft recovery program for people who believe they’ve been victimized. When you review the complicated, time-consuming steps required to respond to an attack on your identity, you realize exactly how serious this vast breach is. It is, in a word, a fiasco.