Equifax Data Breach – Explainer

**This post contains affiliate links and the publisher may be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links.** News came out on September 7th that Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies (AKA "credit bureaus") in the United States suffered a data breach between May and July, and that the personal information of around 143 million Americans was potentially compromised, which is slightly under half of all Americans, but over half the adult population.  With those sorts of numbers, Credit Wizard is in agreement with many other experts that believe it is best to believe your information was exposed while Equifax still works to provide a definitive method for checking if your personal information was potentially exposed.  Equifax put together this webpage here about the incident and their response. As explained in our overview page on credit reporting, individuals don't generally maintain a direct relationship with the credit bureaus; instead the credit bureaus collect information from consumer...
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