Analysts say Equifax fallout in Nevada may be ‘brutal’

Several states, from New York to West Virginia to New Hampshire, on Friday reported the number of victims in the Equifax data breach.

However, the Nevada attorney general’s office couldn’t provide the Review-Journal with the number of Nevadans swept up in the national hack of credit reporting company Equifax.

Shannon Wilkinson, president of Las Vegas-based Axiom Cyber Solutions, said the real question is who wasn’t hacked.

Las Vegas could be a hot spot, she said, given that Las Vegas’ mortgage lending rate is among the fastest-rising and that casinos may often use a credit monitoring company, like Equifax, to issue a line of credit.

“People may be affected and they don’t even know,” Wilkinson said. “One of the things that’s really bad about this hack is that these consumers did not provide the information to Equifax themselves.

“They provided information to those who they were trying to get financing from — the credit card, the loan, the mortgage — and those people sent the information to Equifax to try to make a credit decision based on what the credit reporting agency had on file for the consumer,” she said.

Aside from the threats of identify theft, Las Vegas-based tax attorney Bob Grossman said there’s also a tax risk.

“If someone gets a hold of your Social Security number, they could file a bogus tax return for you and claim your refund,” said Grossman, who is a former IRS senior trial attorney and currently a tax attorney at the Tax Law Center. “It’s pretty brutal stuff.”