Equifax Settlement: More Hoops To Jump Through

I got my claim number. It was at the very top of the email for this.

The claim number is at the top of the email.

My claim number was in the email I got the other day...

Right above the sentence that starts with "According..." there is an headline saying "Your Claim Number: xxx".
This is the same both for me (gmail) and my wife (yahoo - don't get me started!).

Do the services that Chase (or American Express or Citi) provide count? Credit Journey, I believe is the name of the program by Chase.

I got the same message. It's almost as if they think you are lying and don't want to pay you anything, hoping you just drop out.

You have to wonder why the required data was not requested in the original application form.

I have Experian's free credit monitoring service enabled. So I put that in. Not lying, and it adequately meets my needs.

Claim number is at the top of the new email sent saying to state the name of your credit monitoring service, did it yesterday. Honestly I think this step is to start to shake out some people to make the claim amount a bit larger. Doubt more than 50% of the original folks are going to do this step 🙂

Umm, the claim number is on the top of the email.

Obviously, this is their effort to decrease the number of people receiving cash, in the hopes settlements will be larger than the postage required to mail the checks. If this isn't good enough to cull the heard, you will next be required to upload a short video of you jumping on one foot while clapping.

@Colin, I put down Chase Credit Journey as the monitoring service - not sure if it counts but seemed adequate.

I put down Credit Karma as my service. Not sure if it counts but it should.

Who would go through this trouble for the cost of a dinner out?
Can't be worth the time....

Is Credit karma considered a monitoring service...?

...and they are still advertising $125? I would think by now, everyone has been part of one breach or another and are at least eligible for credit monitoring.... so just give us our $1.39, pay off the lawyers, and stay in business collecting our data and making money off it.

IS THIS EVEN LEGAL. DISCRIMINATING HOW I MONITOR THINGS THAT EQUIFAX F***ED UP. NOWHERE DID IT REQUIRE I NEED ANY MONITORING.

I'll be using my ESA goldfish to monitor my credits. Get ready to here from my lawyers if I'm denied.

This is absolute nonsense, but unfortunately we don't have any kind of reasonable regulations in place to prevent this kind of nonsense.

Um... So... To which email is everyone referring? I searched my email system-wide, and the only Equifax hits I see are to the monthly updates I get from their own credit monitoring service, which I receive through AAA. I can't locate a claim number, either. Did I just delete something I shouldn't have, or what?

I put in CreditWise by Capital One. Comes free with their cards. They email me all the time.

The email doesn't say what does or doesn't qualify as a credit monitoring service, which I interpret to mean anything would.

We'll see if they come back with some further requirement.

Every news site and blog that hyped this settlement should now be hyping the objection process for anyone who hasn’t already submitted a claim... It’s pretty clear the settlement falls far short of what the parties claimed it would provide because they expected the standard minuscule claim rate for class settlements.

This is a bad settlement. Your choice is to opt out and pursue your own remedy or opt in and take one of the poor choices.

I suspect that the court (and pressure from the government and the press) has made them come out with these additional requirements. Who knows why, but the plaintiffs' attorneys and the defendants thought that everyone would take the credit monitoring. It's allegedly more valuable. For me, it's also redundant as I get it as a no additional cost service elsewhere (sometimes provided free because of prior breaches). Plus, Equifax gets to develop the scale of its credit monitoring service and increase its future pricing power by this settlement. It likely costs them very little to provide monitoring to additional people. There's something fundamentally wrong about this.

Either way, the attorneys are going to get paid nearly $80 million.

Equifax and the attorneys are winners. The consumer is the loser.

As usual no point in even filing. IMHO all class action suits are rip offs with the only people getting paid the attorneys. There is even a racket in the legal profession chasing these. They don’t care about what the class receives (and will even negotiate away any cash settling for changes in future business processes) as long as “attorneys fees” are adequately covered. Just a scam and can’t believe people wast their time. For me wasn’t worth $125 and I was smart enough to know the actual amount would be a fraction of that.

Done, and done...

I still haven’t received this new email. I’m worried I don’t know how to submit this information.

I don't see how this can be legal in any way but apparently our government is on board. First, they say you will get this amount, then say well it will be less, now they say prove you have a monitoring service. How is that their business? We have no obligation to have a monitoring service and they should not be able to require us to have one. They have all of our private information. We have no choice in the matter - we can't opt-out of them having our information. They should keep it secure - they failed - but hey, let's make consumers jump through hoops to get a $1 check regardless of the fact that we said it would be $125.

Doh! Had it sent to my work email instead. This is what happens when you have a brain the size of a turtle's.