Teachers Retirement System of Texas (oops)

[brerrabbit]

My DW who is the registrar for a middle school in our town received notice today that her personal information including ssn had been posted in a publically accessible server at the Texas Comptrollers office. So had a bunch of other folks who participate in the TRS system. It is basically the state retirement system and public workers at state and county hospitals, school districts and so on. She has called the credit agencies to be put on fraud alert and now I am not quite sure what to do next. Her district is organizing a meeting to have an expert go over identity theft and what to do but that won't happen for a week or so.

Any other ideas?

 

[aggiejamie]

As a teacher in Texas, my information was also included in that "mistake" and I'm soooo angry that it took over a year for them to notice!! A fraud alert will only be effective for 90 days and then I guess you could always request another. My way of thinking is that the info could be used 5 years from now, which is scary!! I already use creditchecktotal.com for credit monitoring, and they will alert me of any changes to my credit report. However, I think the state comptroller should pay for all who were on that list to have credit monitoring for the next 10 years or so.

 

[MomToOne]

You can freeze your credit with all of the credit agencies, which is much stronger than a fraud alert and lasts longer. It does have it's downside though - if you need to get new credit truely for you, you have to jump through more hoops to get prove you want the info released as needed.

Here's some info on it from Experian:
http://www.experian.com/consumer/security_freeze.html

 

[m&m's mom]

Since this was not announced until they had removed the data, and they admitted it had been out there for like 2 years- if something was going to happen, I would think it already would have.