Article Title: Federal Workers Frustrated With CSID Identity Protection
Federal Employee News is aware of the multitude of complaints by federal workers regarding the free identity protection service from a company identified as CSID under contract with OPM after a major cyber-breach of employee data. In an effort to verify the authenticity of complaints, the Federal Employee News attempted to enroll in the service after receiving their notification letter from CSID and OPM on June 24, 2015. After reading the letter in its entirety, we followed the enrollment procedure as prescribed. We were able to get to the first step in the process which took us to the special CSID page for the OPM contracted service. This link informs employees to click on a link identified as "Affected Individuals ENROLL NOW" ...we clicked the link. Trouble already! Dang. The site said, "If you are an affected individual who has received an email or letter notification and a PIN code, begin the enrollment process now by clicking ‘Enroll Now’ below. You will then be asked to submit the PIN code that was provided to you." Clicking the link gave us an error message saying something about a 'Gateway' issue. We thought maybe it was because we were using a Firefox browser, so we attempted the same with Internet Explorer and got the same result. We thought that was the end of the trail for us. However, while writing this article and making a couple of screen captures, we attempted the process again. Success! Everything worked just fine and we enrolled very easily as prescribed. We are guessing our first attempts were thwarted by overloaded servers or possibly system maintenance. Just a guess on our part. So if you have an issue when you attempt to enroll, we suggest you go back and try again at different times and all should be fine. We can understand the frustration at failed attempts, but when you have millions of people attempting to enroll in a short span of time, this can cause issues at times. Good luck and happy surfing.
Source: Federal Employee News
