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There is basically no point. When you freeze your credit, you will be assigned a new PIN number. The number is just the time and date of when you set the freeze in month/day/year/24h format, I shit you not.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJUGlMfVYAAOs9i.jpg

They're already being sued for $70 billion, and this is their plan to secure accounts after the breach.

edit: This has apparently been their policy for at least the last 10 years.

There is basically no point. When you freeze your credit, you will be assigned a new PIN number. The number is just the time and date of when you set the freeze in month/day/year/24h format, I shit you not. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJUGlMfVYAAOs9i.jpg They're already being sued for $70 billion, and this is their plan to secure accounts after the breach. edit: This has apparently been their policy for at least the last 10 years.

2 comments

[–] PMYA [OP] 5 points (+5|-0) Edited

Just to highlight how stupid this is, let's imagine a scenario.

Just over 1% of the 143 million affected customers froze their credit in the 24 hours after the breach was reported, say 1.44 million. There are 1440 minutes in a day, meaning that there are a maximum of 1440 different PIN numbers that can be allocated by Equifax on any given day. 1.44 million divided by 1440 is 1000. That means that on average, every minute of the 24 hours after the breach was reported, 1000 accounts would be given the exact same PIN number.

If you take into account the few hours after the breach might not have been enough time for people to hear about it, and also that people are working during the day, the timeslot for those inital freezes shrinks, meaning that there are probably more than 1000 accounts allocated the same PIN in peak times. You could even look by hour to see how popular certain searches are to find the best timeslot for the PINS being allocated, giving you a large chance of getting a well-used PIN number.

Edit: Also bear in mind that those numbers are if 1% froze their credit, the real number is probably larger.