Grabar Law Office files national class action on behalf of all persons who reside in the United States whose Personally Identifiable Information was compromised as a result of the data breaches occurring at Equifax between March and August of 2017. As alleged in the Complaint, from March through July of 2017, Equifax experienced one of the largest data security breaches in history. Cyber attackers stole the Personally Identifiable Information of approximately 145 million Americans from Equifax’s files. (“Class Members”). In the face of this extraordinary event which caused so much harm to so many innocent Americans, three key executives of Equifax decided that this was the time to extract an extraordinary profit based on their inside information, before information about the breach became public. These executives dumped nearly $1.8 million in stock holdings shortly after July 29. On August 1, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and another executive, Joseph Loughran, exercised $584,099 in stock options. The following day, Rodolfo Ploder sold $250,458 in Equifax stock. Following Equifax’s September 7 data-breach announcement, shares plummeted more than 13%, wiping out more than $2 billion in investors’ assets. This is the third data breach at Equifax since 2015. Despite two prior incidents and the fact that it was storing sensitive personal information that it knew was valuable to, and vulnerable to, cyber attackers, Equifax failed to take security precautions that could have protected Class Members’ data. Instead, Equifax used grossly inadequate computer systems and data security practices that allowed the hackers to easily make off with Class Members’ Personally Identifiable Information. As alleged in the Complaint, since the Data Breach, Class Members have been repeatedly harmed, and all of them are at risk for future identity theft given the loss of privacy of their Social Security numbers. Class members have spent countless hours filing police reports and poring over credit reports to combat identity theft, but new fraud is still being perpetrated against them using the sensitive information taken during the Data Breach. Many are now paying monthly or annual fees for identity theft and credit monitoring services that they trust, and others have had to place credit freezes on their accounts, which greatly hinders their ability to transact business and apply for credit as they could before the breach.
