How do I know if I’ve been affected by the Equifax breach?

Equifax has a website where you can check. The company will not inform you otherwise, even though it has your address (which was one of the things that the hackers helped themselves to).

But even if your name doesn’t appear on the website, it’s probably a good idea to freeze your credit anyway.

Why is freezing important? When a thief shows up with your Social Security number and address to apply for credit in your name, the lender will try to fetch your credit report before anything else happens. If it can’t retrieve the report because of the freeze, then no new account for the thief.

I’ve used the Equifax site a few times in the last several weeks and have received different answers about whether I was affected. How do I know which answer is the right answer?

According to the company, thieves took names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and addresses for up to 145.5 million people. They also helped themselves to some smaller number of driver’s license numbers.

Thieves may have your equifax customer service number, too; this is the case for more than 200,000 people, and Equifax has said that it let those people know by mail.

Equifax has said that it has no evidence of a breach in its core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases, so your payment history is not floating around in the ether somewhere. Nor did the thieves get PINs that people use to unlock their frozen credit files.

Oh, and TransUnion and Experian (especially Experian, which has a similar name to Equifax) very much want you to know that their systems are not part of this particular breach