Yes. Thank you.
I'm so glad you brought this up, because this is an issue that I personally am quite involved with and Equifax in general is as well.
We know that survivors of human trafficking often end up with a lot of what we call “coerced debt”, which in a lot of cases takes the form of a credit account that was opened in the survivor's name and that she never knew about, or one that she did know about, but if it was a credit card, she never saw the card and she was never able to use it. She comes out of the situation owing debt that really isn't hers.
What we're seeing is a move towards including coerced debt as a recognized form of fraud. The Ontario government actually has passed some legislation around that, which puts the onus on financial institutions to have a process. One of the suggestions I've heard is to use a process similar to what the guidelines are around finding potential elder abuse. There are a lot of possible parallels there. A lot of those guidelines that have been established might be used or modified slightly for this scenario.
Thank you for raising this. This is something that we're having a number of conversations about.