More than half of Americans had their Social Security Numbers exposed in the 2017 breach of credit reporting firm Equifax EFX, -2.02% and, it turns out, the company’s chief executive officer knows a little about what they’re going through from firsthand experience.
Equifax CEO Mark Begor told U.S. Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat from California, during a hearing on Tuesday that he had been the victim of identity theft three times in the past 10 years. During the contentious exchange, Porter asked Begor to share his Social Security Number, birth date, and address at the public hearing to make a point about privacy concerns.
Begor shared his own experience as part of an effort by Equifax to tell consumers what it learned from the massive hack, said Nancy Bistritz, a spokeswoman for Equifax. (Equifax did not reveal the nature of the Begor’s own identity theft or specify whether any of these instances was related to his own company’s data breach.)
“We believe that identity theft continues to be a shared threat faced by all organizations, and that the sophistication of this act requires consumers to remain vigilant about protecting their personal information,” she told MarketWatch.
He’s not alone. Nearly 60 million Americans had been affected by identity theft as of 2017, a 2018 Harris Poll survey found.
Given the prevalence of identity theft, it’s unsurprising that the CEO of one of the country’s largest credit-reporting agencies has been affected, said Ted Rossman, an industry analyst at CreditCards.com.
In the past few years, 500 million customers of hotel chain Marriott MAR, -1.29% had personal data revealed, more than 1 billion accounts at Yahoo were exposed, and millions of LinkedIn accounts were part of a data breach.
“All of us should assume our personal data has been compromised,” Rossman said. “There have been so many high-profile data breaches that chances are, some bad guy somewhere has access to all of our sensitive data.”
As these breaches continue to play out, consumers should take advantage of free credit-freeze services, Rossman said. Starting September 2018, freezing credit reports through all three major bureaus — Equifax EFX, -2.02% Experian EXPN, -2.44% and TransUnion TRU, -0.69% — do not cost anything. Previously, the service cost around $10.
Still, only one in four Americans have frozen their credit.
“There will surely be another massive data breach at some point,” Rossman said. “You’ll sleep easier if you’ve taken the smart proactive step to freeze your credit.”
If you believe you’ve been a victim of identity theft, you should contact the company where the theft occurred, place a fraud alert on your credit reports, submit an identity theft affidavit through the Federal Trade Commission, and file a police report. It’s also important to monitor all accounts more frequently after a breach.
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