Nearly half of Americans had their personal information stolen last week from Equifax. Are you one of them? If you plan to purchase a home, now is the time to find out. New accounts opened while trying to obtain financing can derail your home purchase. Here’s what you need to know.
The information stolen including names, Social Security numbers and addresses can be used by an imposter to open accounts in your name, steal your tax refund or your Social Security check. You may not know these new accounts have been opened for some time, allowing the theif to rack up large balances in your name.
Some of the victims of the Equifax hack did have their credit card numbers exposed. Equifax will notify you in the mail if this is the case. However, they won’t notify you directly if you’re one of the 143 million people whose more sensitive information was stolen. You must go online to EquifaxSecurity2017.com to find out.
There are some steps you can take right now, like placing a freeze on your credit reports, to help prevent it from happening.
And even if everything seems fine now, you should also continue to keep a close eye on your accounts and credit reports because your identity might not be stolen right away.
If you do find out that someone has created a new account in your name, you’ll have to prove that you didn’t open the account and you might have to clear bad debt information from your credit report.
It could be a long, messy process. Here’s where to start:
1. Go to IdentityTheft.gov to file an identity theft report …
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