Lawyers suing over the Equifax data breach have turned to the Fair Credit Reporting Act — a statute the credit reporting agency has lobbied over — to bring class actions on behalf of 143 million potential victims.
About 60 class actions so far have been filed over the Sept. 7 breach, which potentially compromised the names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and, in some cases credit card information, of 143 million people. As of Sept. 12, the suits had been filed on behalf of a nationwide class and in 26 states, including Georgia, New York, California, Texas, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. On Monday, a group of attorneys led by John Yanchunis of Morgan & Morgan and former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, who filed a class action in Georgia, moved to coordinate all the cases into multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, where Equifax Inc. is based, in Atlanta.
