man my doctors office uses some third party outfit out of Belfast Me to process our payments that we made out to our doctors office. My doctors office in Crossgate Brandon. any way, i pay the doctors here locally and they send the payment to this place in Maine who gets hacked.
Anyway they inform me and give me two years of Equifax for free to keep up with any suspicious activity on my accounts. worked out fine so far. if they do not offer you that try requesting it. it s normally like $25 a month . told me that several of my passwords and e mail addresses were found on the dark web but none have tried to been used yet.
I assume my info was stolen from the big equifax breech. It was in 2017 and I had no problems till last year - so that was over 5 years later. Someone opened a credit card in my name at another address and ran up over $10k. From what I could tell the address used was a house that had been for sale, I assume the thief was using it for all correspondence - how he got the actual card. He even paid the bill for a few months. My credit score had dropped to 500
Also interesting… anyone with your info can steal / hack your experian account. When I was doing the disputes with each credit bureau, it said I already had an experian account and showed me a partial email address that I didn’t recognize. I simply created a new account - basically stole it back from the id thief. Ridiculous how easy it is for someone with your info to set up a new account and access your experian report. Iirc you can set up two factor verification once you have control of the account… and maybe keep them from stealing it back.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/its-still-easy-for-anyone-to-become-you-at-experian/
I will say I was surprised how easy it was dealing with the cc company. I basically told them it wasn’t me who opened the card, wasn’t my address they had on file, I didn’t know the card number, etc and they closed the account and marked it fraudulent. That was maybe a 10 minute phone call. Took another 6 months for the debt collector to quit calling