| # part 2/3 # 3 days later, on May 31, I received a reply that Equifax was unable to locate the account, and requesting further information. I replied providing this information. I received another reply from Equifax saying they could not find the account, closing the ticket, and asking that I call in for support. That same day (today), I called in and was connected to the Personal Solutions department. I briefed the representative, Mike, on the background of the situation and asked if there was a fraud or security department that could investigate this. I was told no, and the closest department was Disputes, which was closed on weekends. I indicated that if there was a hacking involved, this might be time-sensitive, and could affect other Equifax accounts. I was told there was no other way to get assistance. I verified my identity with <rep_name>, who created a new account for me, and was able to view the email change history, but said he could not release the email address that the account had been changed to. I requested 6 times to speak with a supervisor and was deflected each time. After 1 hour and 15 minutes, I was put on hold for 15 minutes, then connected with <supervisor_name>, the supervisor. <supervisor_name> was helpful. She marked the account for investigation and indicated that it would take 7 to 10 business days. I asked if this could be expedited and she said sometimes it could occur more quickly but there was no guarantee. |
That's typical. A long time ago, I received an offer to sell me 100k stolen credit cards, complete with phone numbers and zip codes of the card owners. This was before the era of mega breaches and so 100k was a pretty impressive list size. The offer included a sample of 10k cards. I did some investigation and was able to determine that the sample, at least, seemed to be legit.
I then contacted the credit card companies, figuring they would be interested in this. I figured they would take the samples, analyze them to find out the common factors to identify where the cards were stolen from, and then flag those cards, and the people they were stolen from and the merchants they were going to be fraudulently used at would be protected by the next day.
Boy, was I wrong.
This was a Friday and it was after 5 PM. The best I got was one card company gave me an email address that I could mail the 10k sample cards and the information about the offer for 100k cards to, and someone would look at it Monday.
I also tried law enforcement. The FBI suggested that I call the Secret Service. The Secret Service was not interested.
I mailed the information to the email that the one credit company provided, and gave up trying to get someone interested.