When I tried to get my Equifax credit report through, after time spent entering data and confirming screen after screen, at the very end it said it could not handle my request at this time and suggested that I contact the two other agencies instead!!!! 'Leave us alone, go bother our competitors.' All four of them were 'none of the above.' What was very disturbing was that one question asked some about my student loan payments-I answered 'none of the above'-but the next question asked for the approximate dollar amount of my student loan payments! Clearly, they had retrieved KBA questions appropriate for somebody else. One of the worst-I think it was with TransUnion when I was trying to request a credit report-was a set of four 'KBA' (knowledge-based authentication) questions that were off the wall. I don't think anything bad was happening, but sites that handle sensitive data should be punctilious about good error handling. And every single one of them waited until we had put in ten or fifteen minutes of diligent work, entering sensitive data and answering questions-only to freeze, report 'server dephragmization timeout CUBEB_FUNGUSx16AD22', or at best suggesting that you should have telephoned them in the first place.Īll this bad behavior is vaguely characteristic of man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks.

Every single one left us with endlessly spinning widgets, freezes, blank screens. It is especially alarming because nobody's web sites handled the overload gracefully. If they had done so in order to gear up for high traffic-and had quietly notified the other credit reporting agencies so that they could be ready, too-I could forgive them, but I see no evidence that they did anything of the sort. The credit reporting agencies should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging insecure behavior (Equifax redirecting to a non-Equifax URL and then asking for SIX digits of SSN, for example) and for badly implemented websites that don't give clean, accurate error messages under heavy load.Įquifax gave themselves two months before disclosing the error. There were more problems with Equifax than the others but it is a royal mess. One person (neilpilot) reports a customer service rep.Įven though I froze my accounts with the Big Three a couple of years ago, and even though my wife and I waited a few days before taking additional action, we both experienced many errors, crashes, mysterious messages, and so forth.

(OP of this thread doesn't mention when he tried to place the freeze, so I can't tell if his report is an indication that the problem is continuing or if it also dates to the early days after the hack was reported.) The people on that thread seem to have attempted to place the freeze in the early days after the hack was reported (early September) when the website was particularly overwhelmed. keep reading for various reports and attempts at solutions for the 'no PIN' problem, especially towards the end of the thread). (There are several issues discussed in the thread. Multiple people reported having this 'freeze, but no PIN' problem on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=227693 ('Equifax Credit Freeze 100% online') Glad to hear the freeze was actually successful. I still haven't called the company directly yet. Now I can't even get their web page to load - a problem I really want to fix. I had written a note to my file that I still needed to acquire a PIN, but forgot to follow up on it until this latest data breach. I tried to place a security freeze at Equifax in 2015, and your account of the process sounds exactly like my experience (as far as I can recall). Please let me know if anyone has had this problem and if they found a resolution. The $5 isn't the end of the world, but this is just stupid. Has this happened to anyone else? In my state it appears there would be a $5 fee to retrieve it (although I never got it) and I have to mail away for it. Now, since I received an error when doing this, I never got to the window with the.

I tried calling the automated line to freeze my account, and it indeed said there was a freeze on my account. I went back later to try again, and the only option available at this point was to 'unfreeze' my account, so it looked like the freeze worked.

I filled out the form, clicked next and the browser spun for a while and then I got an error saying it was unable to process my request at this time. So, I tried to put a security freeze on at Equifax.

Equifax security freeze lift pin