Equifax Will Offer Free Credit Locks for Life, New CEO Says

By Jan. 31, Equifax will permanently give consumers the ability to lock and unlock their credit for free. The company will also extend the sign-up period for TrustedID Premier, the free credit-monitoring service it’s offering all US consumers.

The service will be introduced by Jan. 31, Chief Executive Officer Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, a day after taking the helm. The company will also extend the sign-up period for TrustedID Premier, the free credit-monitoring service it’s offering all U.S. consumers, he said. “The service we are developing will let consumers easily lock and unlock access to their Equifax credit files,” Barros wrote. “You will be able to do this at will. It will be reliable, safe and simple. Most significantly, the service will be offered free, for life.”

Free for life = free until people forget / next news cycle then start charging again.

Easy to offer free for life when you going to be out of bussniess in a couple years from all the fines and lawsuits coming.

I don't want to see them survive with the openly blatant BS they pulled.

Leak happened in March, instead of reporting it, they found the time to:

- Get their local senator to sponsor a bill (they likely wrote) limiting damages that could be achieved and the legal methods available to a data breach.
- Acquire a credit protection company.
- Allow execs to try and profit off of it by shorting stock. Which means that many in the company knew of the breach.

So instead of using the time between leak and disclosure to bolster their customer service (making sure they could handle what is about to come their way), they tried to play lobbyist games. Fuck them.

So we can lock/unlock our credit for free starting the end of Jan.... Great, that's only 10 fucking months after the leak of our data. But at least the pin will still be secured with the same data exposed in the leak.....

And they are going to keep dumping money into congress to get them to limit their financial exposure to this incident and to tell everyone they are offering a great service.

Had to unlock my security freezes a week ago for an RV purchase, Equisux did not have the gall to charge me the $10 normally required for a temp unlock, that was the LEAST they could do.

They got cute promotional elves, reptiles, rabbits, and hamsters. like a box of cereal.