It wouldn't have to search 143 million SSNs. It could be that fast using just the two key search.WiseOne wrote:My sister just checked the Equifax site and had some excellent questions. Her entire family including her two kids, who have no credit history at all not to mention that the family live in Canada, came up as potentially compromised. My sister pointed out that searching a database of 143 million SSNs should take a while, whereas the site instantly comes back with the answer "yes".
But....
I thought about this too so I checked it with my first wife's SSN and got a positive hit. She's been dead for 16 years.
So I just started making up bogus names and SSN's. Sure enough every one of them came up positive.
So one of my former employers is run by a bunch of crooks.
Or....
This is making me think even more that the enrollment procedure might be part of the hack to get more personal information than the hackers already have, and maybe I shouldn't have done it. Equifax already had all of that information but now whoever is getting it has my mobile phone number too.