Mega theft of data at Desjardins: “We’re still trying to get into my accounts five years later”

“It was a nightmare, and still is. We are still trying to get into my accounts, despite the changes,” sighs Carine Barbeau, victim of the Desjardins megatheft, who maintains that she is still suffering the consequences five years later, like many Quebecers.

“I’m exhausted. I am always hypervigilant. I can’t let go of my guard. I have to watch all the time,” says Carine Barbeau, a retiree from Terrebonne, victim of historic identity theft from Desjardins, in a fragile voice.

“I had to change my phone number. I decided to have as few account spaces as possible online and to return to paper,” she adds, staring at the Caisse populaire across the street from the park.

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Back to paper

Insurance, banks, telephony… Carine says she has been marked to the point where she now hesitates to open account spaces on the web and never shares her email.

Four years ago, The newspaper had told the story of this mother who denounced the cumbersome procedures to obtain compensation.

While we now know the identity of the 8 suspects arrested or sought by the Sûreté du Québec in connection with the megatheft of personal data of 9.7 million Desjardins customers, The newspaper wanted to know how she was doing today.

Like many affected Quebecers, Carine Barbeau had to waste a lot of time to ensure the damage was minimized. Last January, she finally obtained $935.44 as part of the class action.

“We had to show that there had been identity theft, the evidence. Everything has been sent. The lawyers examined the evidence,” she explains. “It was problematic to change my telephone numbers and addresses,” she whispers.

Unlike others, Carine did not lose money, but she had to make numerous calls to Equifax in recent years to block credit requests that were constantly being added to her account as if by magic.

“I had to call Equifax to block all of this,” she says.

Bad score

And Carine is not the only one. In recent days, a member of Desjardins told Newspaper having had to fight for weeks with Equifax and TransUnion to restore his credit score after the fraudulent use of his personal information.

An individual opened a credit card account in his name and spent several thousand dollars without being worried. Five years after the leak, such cases are happening since stolen data is still found on the hidden web.

– With the collaboration of Gabriel Côté and Sylvain Larocque