At the recent Congressional hearing regarding the careless Equifax breach, Senator Elizabeth Warren set forth to summarize all the many ways in which Equifax has benefited and will benefit after porking some 145,500,000 Americans.
To begin with, we have that “free monitoring of your credit service” which Equifax’s original sop to public outcry for its unforgivable carelessness. While this service was certainly free during the initial year, every year after that Equifax soaks you for $17 per month. Even if 1% of all people who signed up for the alleged “free” credit monitoring for some reason forget to cancel, this company will gain an extra $200,000,000 every year.
And then we have the Lifelock enrollments. Lifelock is a discredited, fraudulent company that pressure sells a totally useless credit monitoring service which is bought from Equifax. During the first week following the Equifax breach, Lifelock enrolled 100,000 additional customers at $29.95 per month, and then Equifax receives a huge cut from all of these new customer fees.
So now let us talk about the fraud prevention service, which is the newest crap service offered by Equifax. Now that we have all this breached data floating online, it stands to reason that fraud is sitting at all-time highs. This has created a demand for new anti-fraud contracts, and our friends from Equifax stands at the ready to supply those needed services, and actually federal agencies have begun to offer the company profitable multi-million dollar contracts to thwart this fraud — that is now ready to explode because of all this personal data that Equifax released all across the world where anyone with bad intentions and questionable morals can collect and gather.
It’s true that Equifax’s stock is now down 30%, but as Wells Fargo helpfully reminded us, that’s just the market overreacting and Equifax stocks are “”an attractive entry point,” a chance to buy into a “high-quality consumer credit franchise” that will “outperform” current projections.
In short, the Senator argued, Equifax has far more to gain from its data breach than it does to lose, with the average victim of a data breach receiving a payout of just $2 in restitution, she said.
“Consumers will spend the rest of their lives worrying about identity theft,” Warren continued. “But Equifax will be just fine—heck, it could actually come out ahead.”
Quoting Smith’s earlier comments, delivered at the University of Georgia business school in August, Warren, an outspoken consumer watchdog, accused him of not only injuring Americans affected by the Equifax breach, but of profiting off their plight.
After Smith conceded that the Equifax hack had increased the likelihood of fraud, the Senator used his own words against him: “So the breach of your system has actually created more business opportunities for you,” Warren said Wednesday at a hearing of the Senate banking committee.
