Federal Trade Commission Says Data Breach Victims Of 2017 Equifax Hack Likely Won’t Receive The $125 Maximum Payments That Were Advertised By Equifax

Seemingly all the news publications you peruse mention something about a major corporation getting hacked into by cybercriminals on a regular basis. These cybercriminals target large organizations like Yahoo, for example, in hopes of obtaining such entities’ banks of user information.

This information is later sold on the World Wide Web, in most cases, or – although this isn’t as common – cybercriminals personally commit identity theft and attempt to use the credit card numbers, bank account details, and other valuable personal information they get their hands on to purchase goods and services.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past several years, you should remember hearing about Facebook’s breaches of its own privacy policy at least a few times. Most of these instances of wrongdoing consisted of Facebook allowing advertisers or other organizations to get their hands on Facebook users’ info without them knowing.

Although it wasn’t record-breaking or especially controversial, you may remember a data breach that affected Equifax, one of the three official, trusted credit bureaus here in the United States, just over two years ago.

In Sept. 2017, Equifax shared that cybercriminals got their hands on enough types of information, which belonged to some 150 million customers who live across the United States, to commit identity theft and pose as any of the many users whose private, identifiable data was wrongfully stored by Equifax.

Equifax officials noted that, even though they didn’t first learn that cybercriminals had hacked into Equifax’s in-house, private digital network until late July 2017 – July 29, to be more specific – the breach is thought to have started as early as the middle of May 2017.

Last week, Equifax reached an agreement with state- and federal-level regulatory agencies across the United States to pay anywhere between $300 million and $425 million to people who were affected by the 2017 data breach. Each user could receive a maximum of $125, according to the credit bureau.

Earlier today, on Wednesday, July 31, 2019, the United States Federal Trade Commission warned American consumers who were affected by the data breach that they are very unlikely to haul in the full $125 that was advertised to claimants by Equifax. People who were affected by the 2017 data breach are also eligible to sign up for the free credit monitoring services that are offered by Equifax instead of choosing to receive a payment.