Equifax will not give me my free credit report. They claim that they can’t verify my identity online with the four questions they ask, none of which have anything to do with me or my history. Oddly enough, the other two bureaus have no issues at all, and neither does credit karma, which updates my Equifax report weekly. Oddly, neither did the FTC website that allowed me to check my status and file a claim for the breach with a bare minimum of information they requested.
I was going to freeze my report with Equifux, but they wouldn’t let me do that either and sent me a snail mail form with a code to create an account and to do that.
So then, they wouldn’t let me log in, even with the code they sent me and said I should call them. They sent me an email thanking me for creating an account, which I forwarded to their customer service email addy suggesting they just delete the account as it was absolutely useless.
They then sent me this email:
SWAMY? REALLY?
To which I cheerily replied:
I hope they have to spend a buck per letter to send out 145 checks for a lousy nickle. Fuck each and every person there with a barrel cactus. Assholes.
I’ve talked to call centers in India before that were very helpful. Discriminating against an offer of support due to it appearing to be outsourced to SE Asia or some other foreign place is not a conclusion based on reason, but rather based on something much worse.
If I was being too obtuse, I’m saying that’s racist bullshit.
In case you were not aware of this, you are neither a paying customer nor a paying client of Equifax. You (or more precisely, the information about you) are their product, which they collect, package, and sell to their paying customers and clients (i.e. the financial industry).
With that being the case, Equifax is under no obligation to make you happy – on the contrary, they are quite capable of making you very unhappy.
In other words, I’m not sure I would go out of my way to piss them off, because if they screw up your credit report, it can make your life very difficult.
I was trying to give more of the benefit of the doubt as to what OP meant, but that’s why I asked the question.
It’s not racist to observe that many India-based call centers do seem to be poorly run. But that’s down the policies of the U.S. companies running them, and I think OP should give more careful thought to the impression he’s giving with what he said. It’s certainly a serious problem to appear to be inferring something negative about anyone with an ethnically Indian name that you come across.
To be technical, they’ve already screwed all of us by allowing their database to be hacked. The fact that we’re their product and not their customer is also an enormous problem because they make it hard for us to correct wrong data they may have on us.
I hate those security questions, too. They’re worse than the brain-dead security questions where you pick your own question because they pull bizarre stuff out of apparently nowhere and then won’t talk to you if you give the wrong answer. A question they hit me with once was this:
Q: What was the company name of a credit card you recently opened?
A1: Exxon
A2: Sears
A3: Mobile
A4: Citibank
I looked at the card I knew they were referencing and you know what the company name was? ExxonMobile. Neither answers A1 nor A3 were considered correct.
You’re the one distracting from the Equifax issue when you casually threw in what appeared to be a racist comment. And you’ll continue to do so if you evade the issue. If that wasn’t your intention, why not just say so and explain what you meant.
I went through the same questions as the OP, and for me, too, they said I had to send in an application by letter. I think it’s deliberately obtuse, in order to discourage people. I did send in the letter request, several months ago, and still haven’t gotten the report.
I have to agree that this would have been a perfectly reasonable pitting except for that blindingly hateful all caps bit. There’s a million reasons to hate calling any company. But not the guy’s name who emailed you. It’s not like you’ll even talk to that guy when you call. And chances are it was an automatic response anyway.
The same thing happened to me just today. I logged in to Equifax yesterday, to use their online tool to dispute an entry. Got through their 4 stupid security questions (none of which had anything to do with my account.). I just clicked “none of the above” and was fine.
However, I tried this morning to check the status of my dispute and got 4 different, but equally as useless, security questions. Clicked “none of the above” and got the same message as the OP that I’m supposed to call them. WTF?
How hard is it, when asking someone to verify items from their credit report, to actually ask questions about items on that particular report?
It must be an across-the-board issue. I was dealing with TransUnion yesterday as well. Using their on-line system. NONE of the security questions had anything to do with items on my credit report. But not only did clicking “none of the above” get me through, my issue was resolved immediately. I’m not sure how that works, but within 10 seconds their system said my inquiry had been resolved and the incorrect item had been removed from my report.
