Millions of Americans received false credit reports from Equifax, a consumer reporting agency, over the course of three weeks this year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
According to the report that cited “bank executives and others familiar with the errors,” the Atlanta-based company, which is one of the “Big Three” consumer credit reporting agencies, along with Experian and TransUnion, allegedly gave the wrong scores to people applying for home, car, and credit card loans.
In a statement, Equifax attributed the incorrect scores to a “coding fault” and claimed that it has since been resolved.
In a legacy, on-premise server system in the United States that was going to be moved to the new Equifax CloudTM infrastructure, Equifax discovered a code problem.
In a legacy, on-premise server system in the United States that was going to be moved to the new Equifax CloudTM infrastructure, Equifax discovered a code problem. This problem, which persisted for a few weeks, raised the possibility that several attributes utilised in model calculations might have been calculated incorrectly. This problem did not affect credit records, it stated in part.
The firm disclosed a significant cybersecurity incident in 2017 in which hackers gained access to the personal information of 145.5 million American users, including names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, residences, and driver’s licence numbers. The attack also exposed about 210,000 users’ credit card details.
According to the business, 2.4 million more consumers in 2018 were impacted, increasing the total to around 148 million.
Later that year, the Security and Exchange Commission charged Jun Ying, the former CIO of Equifax, with selling stock in the firm before the breach’s details were made public.
Ying admitted guilt, was found guilty of insider trading, and was given a four-month sentence in federal prison as well as a roughly $120,000 reparation order.