The email, which came from the Equifax Breach Settlement Administrator, informs applicants to “verify your claim for alternative compensation by providing “the name of your credit monitoring service that you had in place when you filed your claim.”īusiness Column: If a $5-billion fine won’t shake Facebook, what can bring it to heel?įacebook’s investors weren’t fazed by its $5-billion fine. That brings us to the email, which showed up in my email account only Saturday. 3, according to a web archive, claimants who opted for the cash benefit were asked only if they wanted the money paid by check or prepaid card. Interestingly, the website currently requires applicants for the cash benefit to give the name of their existing credit monitoring service before proceeding. The bottom line is that countless Americans signed up for a $125 cash benefit plainly on the assumption that they’d get $125, on the condition only that their data had been breached - which they could determine by plugging their name, address and a few other personal facts into a settlement website. For an agency with the job of ensuring that people aren’t misled or cheated by the fine print in consumer contracts, its failure to make the terms crystal clear up front, and in BOLD TYPE, is inexcusable. Bad call, since the FTC itself seems to have been rather confused itself. The FTC seems to have decided that most consumers would have no trouble navigating through its multiple formulations of the settlement terms. In yet another notice posted on its website and dated this month, the agency says that the settlement includes free credit monitoring for up to 10 years and adds parenthetically: “(Previously, a cash payment was identified as an alternative to the free credit monitoring, but there are limited funds available.)” The deal, the FTC said in a July statement, was for “up to 10 years of free credit monitoring OR $125 if you decide not to enroll because you already have credit monitoring.” What wasn’t clear was that you couldn’t seek the cash payout unless you already had credit monitoring.īusiness Column: Insurance firms’ blunders on long-term care insurance create disaster for millionsĬalPERS and other marketers of long term care insurance screwed up their calculations, creating a crisis for millions of customers. Yet the agency’s multiple web postings arguably have stoked consumer confusion. Gruenwald noted that the FTC, in a July 31 blog post, notified applicants to expect an email from the settlement administrator asking them to identify the credit monitoring service they already have. She cited a July 22 blog post specifying that “affected consumers were only eligible for the alternative cash option if they already had credit monitoring.” “We would dispute the assertion that we had not previously made clear that the alternative cash payment was for those affected consumers who already have credit monitoring,” FTC spokeswoman Juliana Gruenwald told me by email. The FTC says it believes it has given consumers adequate notice of the terms of the deal. The latest wrinkle involves the realization that the $125 cash benefit was available only to people who already had credit monitoring in place (possible as a benefit from an earlier data breach permitted by our stunningly lackadaisical retailers, banks and data firms. But if you choose 10 years of credit monitoring, Equifax *must* cover it.- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez July 27, 2019 There’s apparently a run on settlements so there’s anxiety people are going to get 16 cent checks. Okay everyone UPDATE on Equifax: for most people the better deal is 10 years of free credit monitoring.
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