Warren, who has built a name as a winner of consumers and who often questions the finance industry, also signed letters to Equifax and its rival credit-monitoring companies TransUnion and Experian, federal regulators, and the Government Accountability Office for data to see whether new federal legislation was required to protect consumers.
“I am disturbed by this attack — described as ‘one of the biggest risks to personally delicate information in recent years’ — and by the fact that it serves the third recent instance of a data breach of Equifax or its subsidiaries that has threatened American’s personal information,” she addressed in a letter to Equifax’s chairman and CEO, Richard Smith.
Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, said the suggested bill would stop businesses like Equifax from charging customers for freezing and unfreezing path to their credit files. A credit freeze limits access to a person’s credit report, which can stop record fraud when thieves apply for credit utilizing another person’s information.
Equifax, which produces individual credit reports used by banks to assess a consumer’s creditworthiness, has come under severe pressure from senators and members of the House in recent days for what has been termed as a slow, inadequate and confusing response to the hack.
Investors have dropped its stock as a result, driving it down 32% since the corporation disclosed the hack on September 7.
The notice from Warren and potential legislative action increases the possibilities the data leak could lead to broader industry changes and heightened regulatory scrutiny longer term.
Equifax, which published the breach more than a month after it learned of it on July 29, said at the moment that thieves may have stolen the personal information of 143 million Americans in one of the largest hacks ever.
In her letters to the administrative agencies, Warren also raised proposals regarding the overall regulatory framework for credit-report agencies, which are not subjected to the same levels of intense investigation as consumer financial firms such as debt lenders or credit-card providers, raising the possibility they could become more tightly controlled in future.
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