As you may have seen in the news recently, one of the United States three credit reporting agencies, and the world’s largest, Equifax had a security breach – a hack- between May and July 2017. 

This breach in their systems has compromised the personal data of 143 million consumers who have credit reports in the United States. Additionally, information was stolen regarding 209,000 US credit cards, and 143,000 credit card claim files.

What to do?

If you have a loan or credit card in the United States, and you have a Social Security Number or an individual Tax Identification Number (iTIN), you might be at risk of having had your data compromised in the breach; it would be wise to find out whether your information was among the files stolen. To do so, Equifax has provided a link where you may check whether your file was affected. To check you will need the last 6 digits of your Social Security Number/TIN and your last name. Be aware that there are reports that say that the results on this page are not reliable.




If the Equifax site informs you that your information was compromised:

There are preventive measures that you can take to protect your accounts and your credit report from identity theft. 

Because Equifax is the source of the compromise of your data, they currently offer a one-year free subscription to their Trusted Id Premier credit report monitoring service. The first year will be complimentary, after which you will be charged a subscription fee of $9,99 a month. 

Alternatively, our blog’s latest post, titled “What you need to know after the Equifax data breach” lists several options for protecting yourself from identity theft; these are alternatives to using Equifax TrustedId, and we recommend you read about them as some might be more  suited to your needs. The article explains the possibility of using credit freezes, fraud alerts, and high-quality credit monitoring services that are available to you and yours. This is very relevant and useful information.

The FTC as also opened a site to address the data breach and offer recommendations on how to protect yourself from the data breach. You will find their page here.

For people who hold credit cards that were compromised directly:

Equifax will mail a letter informing any consumer whose credit cards or disputed files were stolen. If your credit card was compromised, you will need to close that card number and request a new one from the issuer.

To report your OAS FCU credit card compromised, please call (727) 570-4888 or (800) 423-7503 (24 hours/7 days a week).

We hope that your data was not compromised, but feel confident that we are providing you the tools to protect yourself if you were. If new information comes to light regarding identifying which, if any, of our members were victims of the data breach, we will not hesitate to contact you.

Sincerely,