Social Scan FAQ's

Equifax Social Scan searches around 100 social media sites and estimates your fraud risk based upon the amount of personal information made publically available by those sites and associated with the email address(es) you have provided.

Equifax Social Scan has determined three risk levels: low, fair and high.

The more personal information returned by the search, the higher your fraud risk is likely to be.

Minimising the amount of personal information you make available online should help to reduce your fraud risk.

Equifax Social Scan searches around 100 social media sites and estimates your social media footprint based upon the number of sites which return personal information associated with the email address(es) you have provided.

Equifax Social Scan has determined three footprint levels: small, medium and large.

The more social media sites you use, the larger your social media footprint is likely to be.  

Remember, this search will only return information made publically available, so if you are active on multiple social media sites and have limited the amount of personal information published your footprint should remain small.

The first time you run a search it may take some time and we will send you an email as soon as it is complete. We expect that subsequent search requests will be faster.

The results should be quick, but may not be instantaneous. We will send you an email when they are ready, so you’re free to do something else.

We will send you an email when your results are ready.  You will also be able to see them in your Member Centre, just click on the social media tab

Each social media site will be different, so we’d suggest visiting each site you’re active on and checking the privacy policies and settings.

There may be a number of reasons why some information is missing:

1. If your privacy settings are high on the social media site then the general public can’t find it and neither can we.
2. You have not provided us the email that you provided to the social media site when you set it up – so we don't recognise you as being active on that site.
3. You have recently set up a social media account with general access, but the company that runs the social media site hasn’t yet made that information publically available.
4. It is possible that we do not monitor the social media sites you use.

We would expect any change to your social media profile to show in your next search. If you joined a new social media site or set up a brand new profile since you ran your last search this may take a little longer to display in your results.

Any communication to you about any Equifax service will only be sent to the primary email address that you have registered with us.

Any other email address(es) you have verified will be used to run Social Scan searches and for no other purpose.

We search around 100 of the most popular social media sites, for a full list please click here

You can reduce your fraud risk and social media footprint by minimising the amount of personal information you share on social media sites and keeping your privacy settings at the highest level.

Please be aware that when you make a change to your information or privacy settings on a social media site it may take time to filter to your Equifax Social Scan results.

We would expect most change to happen quickly, if not instantaneously. However it is reliant upon the social media provider.