This was written long before the infamous Equifax Data Breach debacle, the information you get is good, unfortunately the company holding it had very bad security measures.
So thanks to the Home Depot debacle with my account information being pilfered (evidently it is still going on in Canada), however, thanks to that I now have unlimited Equifax reports for an entire year.
Thanks to this, I have found about 4 credit accounts that I must close, as I don’t use them, and my opinion is the less credit vehicles available, the less likely it is that someone could pilfer them.
There were two other more interesting pieces of information that I collected from these very interesting reports (I run them once a week, just for fun, and to get my moneys worth). The first and most interesting piece of information is that Equifax has my first name completely wrong. For those who haven’t figure it out my first name is Alan, however the name Alan has many interesting derivatives and spelling:
- Allan (I pronounce as ALL-AN)
- Alyn (Welsh, and is actually pronounced Al-un)
- Al (fricken’ heck never call me that)
- Allen (I pronounce ALL-EN)
Strangely, Equifax has associated with my correct Social Insurance Number the Allen spelling of my first name?!? To their credit they have my correct name under their “Also Known As” section, however, I have never been known as Allen in my life.
The other interesting thing on my credit report is that I am evidently still employed by Nortel Networks. For my regular readers, that has not been true for many years now. Guess they don’t know I am a Civil Servant now.
I suppose I am going to have to fill in a bunch of forms to get all this straightened out, but without having this report, I suppose I would never have known?
I wrote to get my free credit report and one of the items they required on the application was my SIN.
When I received the report, it showed that they did not have my SIN until they received my request for the free report.
It irked me to think that I was disclosing additional information as the price of getting this report. Wonder if they would have sent the free report without my SIN on the application?