Description
Equifax
is an American multinational consumer credit reporting agency and is one of the three largest consumer credit reporting agencies, along with Experian and TransUnion (together known as the "Big Three"). Equifax collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide. In addition to credit and demographic data and services to business, Equifax sells credit monitoring and fraud prevention services directly to consumers.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Equifax operates or has investments in 24 countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. With over 10,000 employees worldwide, Equifax has US$3.1 billion in annual revenue and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol EFX.
Like all credit reporting agencies, the company is required by U.S. law to provide consumers with one free credit report every year.
Equifax was the subject of more than 57,000 consumer complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from October 2012 to September 17, 2017, with most complaints relating to incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or misattributed information held by the company.
In September 2017, Equifax announced a cyber-security breach, which it claims to have occurred between mid-May and July 2017,[11] where cybercriminals accessed approximately 145.5 million U.S. Equifax consumers' personal data, including their full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver license numbers. Equifax also confirmed at least 209,000 consumers' credit card credentials were taken in the attack. On March 1, 2018, Equifax announced that 2.4 million additional U.S. customers were affected by the breach, increasing the number of affected to 147.9 million Americans. The company claims to have discovered evidence of the cybercrime event on July 29, 2017. Residents in the United Kingdom (15.2 million) and Canada (about 19,000) were also impacted. The vulnerability in which Chinese hackers leveraged was CVE-2017-5638, the hackers managed to stay in Equifax systems undetected for approximately 134 days.
In March 2018, the Security and Exchange Commission accused Jun Ying, Equifax's former CIO, of illicit insider trading, by selling company stock before the breach was publicly disclosed.[15] After an investigation by the FBI, Ying pleaded guilty, was sentenced to four months of prison plus a year of supervised release, and was fined $55,000.00 and ordered to pay restitution of $117,117.61 in June 2019. An Equifax manager, Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu, also pleaded guilty to insider trading and received a sentence of 8 months of home confinement.
In July 2019, The New York Times, the New York Post and other media reported Equifax had agreed to pay approximately $650 million to settle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to resolve investigations by several state attorneys general, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the FTC, and a consumer class-action lawsuit related to the data breach.
By September 2019, however, Equifax had added qualifications and "hurdles" to its claims process which put in doubt whether the previously announced cash settlement of $125 per affected consumer would actually be awarded.
On 19 December 2019, a federal judge in Atlanta awarded class-action attorneys representing consumers approximately $77.5 million, suggesting that individual consumers might expect to receive around six or seven dollars.
