Equifax Data Breach, Credit Reporting, and Getting Your Report

My home loan broker recommended getting a credit check on myself so I can be sure there aren’t any hassles.

One particular online service wants to charge me $75 for a yearly subscription to my credit history. I’m thinking that because it is my personal information: it would probably be available somewhere else without the fee or for a reasonable price.

Where can I check my credit history?

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Hi @roony,

You can access one free personal credit report per year from Veda, Experian or Dun & Bradstreet. For more than one per year, or if you need it urgently, you might have to pay a fee. Dun & Bradstreet will provide online access to your report within three working days.

Hope this helps!

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Dont pay for it, you can get it for free, although I can’t remember the details off hand, other than it just takes a bit longer. My wife got stung by this… scam.
When trying to set up a wireless broadband account with Optus, we enquired as to why they were taking so long, and they said is was a problem with credit history. She paid $75 (I think through Veda) to get it quickly and there was nothing out of order there at all! We contactred Optus again and they said there wasn’t a problem the credit history, it was something else, which I’ve forgotten now. We were not happy at having wasted $75.

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You can get your credit rating emailed to you monthly for free. Go to Credit Savvy Australia - https://www.creditsavvy.com.au/ - and sign up. Shows you all your details.

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Nice one @imagea, will give this a try.

I ended up using Veda because my home loan broker recommended it. He said there were some sub standard providers our there and reminded me that an enquiry actually ends up on your credit history. When I received my document, I could see Veda’s details on there.

The service was quick and easy and their consultants were very helpful but there’s room for improvement:

  • The website crashed when I tried to log in. I have not heard anything back from support about this.
  • The emails I’ve received from Veda don’t render properly in my email client. I had to scroll a long way to the right just to read the emails. Easy to miss if you’re not tech savvy and something a competent software engineer could easily fix.
  • I received my credit report via email in PDF format with a password. Excellent! However the password is not random and would be very easy to obtain via social engineering or the most basic of brute force attacks.
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My understanding is that one factor that can lead to a lower credit score is if any credit checks have been made of your records!

I’m afraid that I didn’t have a good result from Veda. I couldn’t access my credit information for free. Even after a year when I tried to cancel they kept charging me.

Hi @lynrod1, did you manage to get it sorted or this situation currently ongoing?

So what was the result of your enquiry and more importantly what did you think of the t and c fit this sight. It seemed to me like they were asking for permission to use your personal data for all sorts of purposes.

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Hi @andrew.p, the T&Cs at creditsavvy seem similar to other sites listed above to my viewing - as you put it, our data is used for lots of different purposes, including direct marketing. While the services are compliant to the law as far as is known, it’s an ongoing concern in terms of privacy and controlling our information online and no doubt will be an ongoing fight for CHOICE.

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I used this link and it was a very easy process.

Note: I was going to post this to an existing thread, but decided upon further contemplation that it belongs in neither ‘Checking your own credit rating’ nor ‘How to fix low credit rating due to credit enquiries’, both of which have been long dormant.

I have just requested a free credit report from Equifax Australia (previously Veda), after reading an ABC article that suggested Australians may be affected by the massive breach of Equifax in the US that resulted in the loss of the records of 145.5 million people!

I initially attempted to use the US tool to “See if you are impacted”, but quickly learned that “The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country”. Great - they want to ensure that I’m ‘not affected’. While I could VPN around it, the system was still going to request my ‘Social Security Number’ - something I seem to have misplaced. Instead I decided to simply request my local credit report.

And so I did, and became increasingly concerned as I went through the process. Fantastic: it’s free. Not fantastic: on first attempt this process ‘timed out’ when I submitted my data, requiring me to go back to the page, re-enter much of the information and figure out which parts of the form were broken. Also not fantastic: it wants to know (one or two of these are ‘optional’, but if you admit that there is data then Equifax demands it):

  • Am I Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms/Dr/Lady/Master/Rev/Sir? (I am apparently not permitted the title Prof, or any other of the myriad options that this list omits including the option to be ‘none of the above’.)
  • First name
  • Middle name (optional)
  • Last name (back in the dim dark past, this was called surname; I am not sure what happened to this term)
  • Gender (male or female - again, no subtleties here)
  • Date of birth
  • Have you ever been issued with a driver’s licence? If so, state/territory and licence number
  • Do you have a Medicare card? If so, card colour, name on card, card number, reference number, and ‘valid to’
  • Email address
  • Preferred phone number (and it won’t accept 00000000 - it checks whether the number is valid)
  • Current residential (not PO) address (Australia)
  • Previous residential (not PO) address (Australia) 1
  • Previous residential (not PO) address (Australia) 2
  • Have you ever been employed?
  • Are you currently employed? By whom?
  • Previous employed? By whom?
  • Most recent credit provider (optional). Yes, an optional question!!!
  • Reason for purchase (i.e. why do you want this report? This provides a long drop-down list)
  • Delivery method (email or post)

(The test states “Driver Licence or Medicare Card Details Required”, but if you state that you have both it demands details for both.)

You are then required to tick a box accepting the Terms and Conditions, which are as usual incredibly demanding and almost certainly unenforceable. This box also states that you “further authorise to have my identity information verified with the Issuer or Official Record Holder”.

Finally, a box is pre-selected for you stating that “You agree to Equifax Pty Ltd and its subsidiaries (Equifax Australia Group) and its corporate partners using and disclosing your personal information to contact you about other goods and services and using your information for direct marketing purposes including contact by phone, email, SMS or other electronic means.” I was able to submit my humble, grovelling request for my own data without this box being ticked - noting of course that the ‘Terms and Conditions’ include what are titled “Direct Marketing Consents” covering all of this and more. You can of course exercise your right not to be flooded with junk: " In order to exercise that choice you need to communicate that to…" Equifax’s PO box!!! Seriously!

So - if you have a look at the above list it contains a large volume of personal information and leads me to some questions:

  1. How much of this information does Equifax need in order to fulfil my request?
  2. Is Equifax using the information submitted in this form to fill gaps in their own data?
  3. Is this lawful?
  4. Should it be?

This is a company whose entire business model is taking my information and selling it to someone else. It largely gathers that information from third parties, but I suspect having gone through this nightmarish process that it is also gathering information as people request reports on their own credit!

Is anyone able to ease my concerns, or alternatively confirm the total moral bankruptcy of this company’s actions? Do we have any laws stopping it from doing exactly what I suspect?

Having submitted my request to the company, I now feel a deep regret at having done so. I feel as though I cannot win in this war on privacy that is being fought equally hard by private and public enterprise. And I feel a little violated.

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I cannot see how this company is unable to figure out who I am using just my name and driver’s licence details, for instance. Its demand for more information seems utterly self-serving.

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Sounds like attempting to organ harvest while you are in to donate blood. :slight_smile:

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I do not like giving my private details to anyone unless it is critical. For this reason I no longer enter competitions and I am not in favour of disclosing what I think is excessive information especially to a credit agency. This is supposed to be about a consumer being able to check that their credit rating is accurate, it is not about any direct marketing or sharing of the consumers personal information. Thanks for the warning.

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I have had similar experiences with this issue. I completed a request when the firm was Veda, and I wouldn’t do it again unless I was forced to. In reference to the address details, I was living at my current address for over 17 years, it would not let me continue unless I entered in my prior 2 addresses. The information on the system is designed for a “5 year life” (ie default listings are supposedly wiped after 5 years) so why was I required to enter information which predates the reporting parameters. It would not process my request unless I entered something, my advice is enter your current address 3 times.

The privacy or financial reporting legislation provides little or no protection for consumers. If I wasn’t so cynical I would say it (the legislation) was written by the financial reporting agencies rather than a “government for the people”. I don’t disagree with the need for this type of monitoring, but from my experience it appears the government in its endeavors to support business has handed it off to private enterprise on a handshake.

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Isn’t that what one ideology with its 2 parties is all about? And they are routinely elected despite what they do and do not do in government. We have met the problem and it is us (the voters).

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I vote for the lizard, because otherwise the wrong lizard might win!

The more closely one looks at western democracies, the less ‘democratic’ they appear. We have abolished the divine rights of kings in favour of…?

My mother keeps quoting what she says is Churchill but in fact was only repeated by him, “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.

I am not entirely sure of the truth of this claim, and think it is worth remembering that Churchill’s experiences of democracy were in its relatively formative years. Universal suffrage had in his time only recently been introduced - today we get to see what an Abbott or a Trump can do to ‘the vote’ when given an opportunity to speak to the millions.

What would be a better system? I do not know - but democracy is currently showing enormous flaws.

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Thanks, well-articulated. I have been unhappy with the way Equifax operate

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