My parent's tuition money goes to this...

JohnnyDaJackal · 10-24-05, 05:15

NEGLIGENCE!!!

Apparently my school, Montclair State University, must have overlooked the fact that 9,100 student's SS#s have been floating online for anyone to see for the past 4 months. I guess all their wonderful construction plans to build a bigger and better MSU got in their way

. I tell you i'm really disappointed, and really hope I don't become a victim of identity fraud and have my credit all screwed up. I got a letter last Saturday from MSU with them trying to explain the situation and offering a free credit report from equifax and 2 other companies. I just called equifax and had them put a fraud alert on my account, hopefully all is good. Just really boggles my mind that so many students had their SS#s widely open online, and the error was found out was through a student who googled his name and was brough up to the MSU server with his SS# and about 9,100 more listed

Jeez!

Anyway heres the headline from our school newspaper, The Montclarion, a little more descriptive of the situation I posted above. I really like MSU, but they really have their priorites mixed up, and would rather build new buildings, just to add to their rep then to worry about students' concerns, and I think this "took the cake" as an example.

Setec Astronomy · 10-24-05, 05:19

Johnny, look at the bright side, maybe you'll become a big movie star and wind up changing your name!

medic · 10-24-05, 06:45

that sucks. are you allowed to lock your credit report in your state? fraud alerts are good and all, but credit companies aren't required to honor them. if you lock your account, new accounts can't be opened. Some states have this, but most don't.

keep checking those reports. hopefully there wasn't much additional information besides your name and SS#, but honestly that's bad enough.

as far as school priorities go, almost all schools are screwed up. it's all about reputation, not about undergrad students. if they really cared, they wouldn't raise tuition faster than inflation. they'd pull from their endowments to help offset costs

DETAILKING · 10-25-05, 01:39

Wow thats disappointing. BTW I live 5 from there.

RazorIX · 10-25-05, 01:46

Could be worse, judging by the thread title I was half expecting it to be on a container load of cocaine or something.

JohnnyDaJackal · 10-25-05, 06:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by DETAILKING

Wow thats disappointing. BTW I live 5 from there.

Wow another Autopian in my general area, always cool to know.

G35stilez · 10-26-05, 12:49

Sorry to hear. That's certainly not very professional.