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Economic Update – September 18, 2017
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Background information:

On September 7th Equifax announced that it had suffered a data breach from mid-May through July that potentially impacted 143 million US consumers.  The data accessed by the criminals includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and addresses.  Equifax also said the breach involved some driver’s license numbers (although it didn’t say how many or which states might be impacted), credit card numbers for roughly 209,000 U.S. consumers, and “certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers”.  Equifax has provided a website with further information on the data breach, https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/.   Additionally, this article, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/the-equifax-breach-what-you-should-know/, has some further information from a consumer point of view that you might find interesting and helpful.

Consumers are being encouraged to sign up for credit monitoring services and/or implement a security freeze with one or all of the major credit bureaus to help minimize identity theft.

As a result of the Equifax data breach we may come across more of your credit applicants who have “frozen” their credit.  To clarify, when customers freeze their credit no one is able to access information on their credit report, therefore a credit decision cannot be made.  We will alert you if the customer has frozen their credit but you might consider being proactive and inquiring if there will be any issues when Pinnacle tries to access their credit.  Pinnacle pulls credit from TransUnion so if the customer has frozen their credit they will need to contact Transunion at 888-909-8872 to unfreeze it in order for us to review.  The customers will need to provide a PIN number to unfreeze their credit. (The PIN number is provided to the consumer when they freeze their credit).  The lift of the freeze should be instant and the report will automatically re-freeze after 24 hours.

What you can do to help prevent delays in getting loan approvals:

  • Before submitting a credit application to us, advise your potential customers that Pinnacle Finance will be checking their credit with TransUnion.
  • Advise them that if they have a credit freeze with TransUnion, they will need to “unfreeze” it so their credit can be reviewed. The TransUnion Security Freeze Services line is 1-888-909-8872.
  • The customers will need to provide a PIN number to unfreeze their credit.   The lift of the freeze should be instant and the report will automatically re-freeze after 24 hours.