Top Ten Tips
Identity Theft Prevention Tips
1. What is identity theft anyway?
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Identity theft, the stealing or obtaining of a persons financial information, also known as ID Theft and Social Security Number Theft, is the act of someone trying to assume another person’s identity for fraudulent use, whether it be the intention of using that data to commit fraud and or create a phony persona, without that persons knowledge.
Fraudulent use of such knowledge, makes it a crime of obtaining the personal or financial information and assuming that persons name. Stealing such information can be committed many different ways, Identity thieves go “dumpster diving”, which is when they sift through trash bins, looking for bank account numbers, credit card statements, to steal lists of customer information, or accessing corporate databases online.
Identity theft can ruin a persons credit rating. You should view your credit report often to check the accuracy of your personal records, and promptly deal with any discrepancies. Using someone’s drivers license number is also considered identity theft. A stolen passport, date of birth, and a ssn can be used to open a fraudulent bank account. Stolen credit card use, or other accounts. Criminal identity theft is the most common non financial type, used to steal another’s personal information, and is just as easy to get arrested for. Financial losses and damaged credit are expensive and time consuming tocorrect. It was in the late 1990’s due to the computerization of records that make it easier to use another’s personal information anonymously over the internet. Identity theft, now a catch-all term, meaning crimes involving illegal usage of another’s individual’s identity, has strong roots and the most common form of identity theft is credit card fraud. The final goal is the practice of stealing money and pretending to be a different person, even offering the last 4 digits or numbers of their ssn as valid proof. Normally Identity Theft is attempted for financial reasons, but it is also undertaken to gain access to information that would otherwise be illegal or inaccessible. With your stolen identity, normally in the form of a social security number, birth certificate information, driver’s license number and the like, anyone can enter a financial institution and open lines of credit using your identity and your good credit rating. With this information the thief can proceed to quickly max out old and new credit cards, new loan’s, and then quickly move on to the next victim, leaving your name and credit rating damaged and in shambles.
You may not learn out about the theft for months. Of course thieves are not going to pay your monthly bills, so late fee’s, penalties, and fines are accruing against you and appear on your credit report. It could take years to clean up your credit history and rating. After all, the credit collectors are looking for the deepest pockets they can find, and you have the easiest and deepest pocket. The identity theft is long gone, and you have to prove it wasn’t you.
2. How are these people getting my personal identification?
Look in your trash can right now. How much information can you find that if in the wrong hands could work against you. So how much information is enough information that can harm you? Are there and credit card offers in there that you just discarded because you didn’t want them? How about any billing statements, or reconciled bank statements that you finished with? Or some old records that have been in boxes for years up in your closet, and you don’t want to take the time to shred all of them, so just this one time, you’re going to tie them all up in several small bags and put them in the trash.
Let me ask you a simple question, “Has your social security number changed in the last ten years? twenty years?”, no it hasn’t. So the trash you threw out from old records, containing your social security number, is the same one that you would use on a credit card application now. Or lets say one of those credit card bills that you just paid, is in the trash you set out tonight for the trash collector tomorrow morning. Once trash is on the curb, its public property. Someone may just collect your trash early, say tonight, and all that personal information you saved up for ten years, is in the hands of someone who just picked the night you picked to clean house.You may not notice any strange activity for some time, or your account may just be empty tomorrow.
With those credit card bills in the hands of someone else, they can send the paperwork back with an address change request, and now the bills that they’re racking up go to that new address, and you never see any odd purchases until months later when your account and credit starts accumulating late payments, and you’re stuck for the bill trying to prove it wasn’t you making the purchases.
3. What steps can I personally take to prevent identity theft?
Things under your control are purchasing a home shredder. Don’t scrimp on quality here, we’re talking about protecting your security. Purchase a cross-shredder, not a strip shredder. A Strip shredder cuts in long strips and can be easy to piece back together. A cross shredder, or even a diamond shredder will make it near impossible to piece together again. Purchase one that can handle up to 10 sheets at a time, but only feed about 3-5 sheets at any one time. This will extend the life much longer, and prevent you from fixing jammed papers so often.
Get one that has a reverse built into it to help those jammed papers. A heavy-duty one will help shred those credit cards also. Don’t worry about one that will shred your CD’s, just bend them up and they’ll be unusable. Don’t forget to use it, take the time to shred things with your name on it. Don’t shred envelope’s with clear windows, or generic mail without any
identifying information, just anything that can be used to submit an application, or request an address change.
Don’t throw away mail you receive that still has your name and address on it, if they are credit card offers, loan offers, or any type of mail that an identity thief can call in or send in providing your name and address to sign up, or redirect a mailing to someplace different than your own. Tear away your personal information off the form before you throw it away, or place it in your home shredder. Have you ever placed a call yourself to a company, and they ask you some personal information to confirm you are who you say you are? They don’t stop at just your street address, they go all the way to ask your zip code.
A thief may know your address, but may not know your zip code unless it was carelessly thrown away. Call to have your name removed from credit card offers at 1-888-567-8688, and phone solicitations to stop. Do not offer any, any information to calls you receive because you never know who actually made the call to you. You could of had information stolen from your trash or somewhere else, and they are using that information making you think “Why wouldn’t this be who they say they are, they have my personal information?”
Tell them you’ll call them back at a number you have on one of your billing statements. Ask for their name and extension, and if it matches what you find on a statement, feel free to call them and then provide what they asked. Its just not worth the chance to give out personal information to someone you’re not sure is who they say they are.
4. How do I know if I’m ok, if my identity hasn’t been stolen and used?
This may be one case where “No News is Good News”. Just because your identity might have been stolen, doesn’t mean that it was used. Remember the Lifelock commercial where the CEO has his Social Security Number plastered on the side of a truck in BIG BOLD LETTERS, well his number may now be in the hands of hundreds of possible thieves, but if it isn’t successfully used, he’s ok, safe from his credit being damaged. To feel this confident, you must select a service that offers Prevention, not just Protection. To learn more about how Lifelock can prevent your credit and Identity from being damaged, click here.
Get a copy of your credit report is one way. You can sign up today and find out either today or tomorrow if everything on your credit report is you, or from your family. Just because you find something wrong in your credit report, doesn’t mean your identity has been stolen. Your name isn’t going to be the only one like it in the world, and records accidentally get merged, or added by error. Most credit reporting agencies will helpfully remove errors. They can see how data got added, and can see if it might have been added by error, and will remove it within days after being notified at no cost. It may take a few attempts, but it can be done.
Watch your bank statements, balance your checkbook, and credit card statements monthly. Go online to view your statement weekly, or at random, to notice quickly if the balance matches your checkbook. Most banks will work with you immediately if you report fraud, and will refund you any losses. In some cases you may never know if your identity was stolen, it may just get misplaced by someone that took your wallet or purse. The important thing is have some form of protection in place to protect what you overlook.
5. How can I fix my credit report and score?
You have to start by getting copies of your credit report directly from the three credit reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. But you say, “I can go through one of the services that gives me all 3 for one price”. Yes, you can get some kind of report, but it may not be the latest, or most accurate. These services do not have the latest information as the 3 primary agencies have. There is a lag in their reporting also. It is proven that the information pulled up on the same day at one of the secondary services as one pulled up from a primary service isn’t the same.
You can find errors on your report, and call in to one of the primary services, have them correct the error, and they will send you a conformation once they correct it. Now go back to that same primary service online, and it will be fixed, but immediately go to a third party service, and they haven’t been updated yet, give them time and it will, so it depends on how
much time you have to wait. Your credit score is also something that can vary if its a primary service or secondary.
Get the copy of your report, go line by line to confirm that each entry was about you and not someone with the same name. Once you have cleaned up any errors, and confirmed that everything is about you, find what might be an entry that has been paid off, such as a lien, but not yet reported as paid off. You can report these to the primary agencies as a “dispute”, and provide them with documented proof that it was paid, or the lien was released. The sooner you make efforts to either remove such entries by requesting the originator to ask for it to be removed, or provide proof it was paid, the better off you are.
Why? Because the longer the time between an item being cleared, released, and now, the better your report will look to someone making a decision to grant you credit. Your score then takes another 30 days or more to be updated. So get on the ball and correct things, stay on track, and learn from mistakes.
6. Why do I need protection for my credit?
An Identity thief will use information they have stolen, such as a social security number, to obtain credit. Once this credit line is opened, they will push it to the limit quickly, and never care about repaying anything. This balance now goes unpaid, month after month, being reported to the credit bureaus as late and never being paid on. This will be extremely difficult to clear up, because you have to now prove it wasn’t you spending the money, and you may spend years and hundreds of dollars on legal fees just to get back to a clean credit history. You will get calls eventually from the lender, persistent calls, letters, threats of lawsuits, and the identity thief is long gone, leaving you to clean up the disaster.
If your credit history is damaged due to identity theft, you will find it extremely difficult to get a loan for even a car, school loan, new credit card… Your credit score is more valuable than you think. There were efforts to link a credit history and credit score, to obtaining a job, obtaining insurance… but these were blocked for now, but there is nothing to prevent those who started it from trying to make it law once again.
7. Does checking my credit report frequently affect my credit score?
Your credit score is only affected by a service that can offer you credit of some sort. Even a car rental agency that accepts payment from a debit card, one that directly pulls from your checking account, will check your credit in order to loan you one of their cars, which will place a ding on your credit report. You should invest in a collateralized credit card to avoid your credit report from queried by places like this.
When you check your own report, it will place an inquiry into a separate category that wont affect your score, and is only seen by you. Which is good because now you’re going to be checking your report more frequently so that errors wont cause a lending institution to deny you credit.
8. What is the most important piece of information that I need to protect?
Your social security number is the number one identification that you should hold tightly. The strongest protection against ID theft is NOT to identify at all – thereby ensuring that information cannot be reused to impersonate an individual elsewhere. Identity theft is often a question of too little privacy or too much identification. How can so much information get out if you personally keep it private? A failure to shred confidential information before throwing it into dumpster’s.
The brokerage of personal information to others businesses without ensuring that the purchaser maintains adequate security controls. The theft of laptop computers being carried offsite containing vast amounts of personal information. If corporate or government organizations do not protect consumer privacy, client confidentiality and political privacy, the acquisition of personal identifiers to commit unlawful acts will continue to be a prime target for criminals.
A crime is considered identity theft when the deceit or intent to gain advantage for himself or another person, the intent to obtain any property or an interest in any property, the intent to cause disadvantage to the person whom he personates or another person, or is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment.
9. What can I do to make sure I keep my good credit?
Now that you have corrected your credit report, and cleaned it up as much as possible, you want to “Keep” it clean. Order your credit report quarterly. Yes there will be a cost, but what is the cost to have fraudulent activity on your credit and allow it to continue. So much damage can be created in one week by identity thieves that you must catch fraud as quickly as possible. There are services that will notify you if questionable activity occurs on your credit report, this is incurring a monthly expense, which has its merits to catch fraud as soon as its happening.
Keeping a correct credit report is similar to driving on an icy road. The better you keep your car under control, the better chance you stand to getting where you’re going. Regaining control once the car starts sliding sideways, is much harder, and can take much of your resources to put the car back to its original condition if an accident occurs. Your credit report is much the same, keep in under control, you have the ability through being pro-active.
10. Can information be taken from my computer by viruses or online tracking devices?
Yes, have you ever gone to a web site that you’ve been to before, and it says “Welcome back (your name)”, how did they get your name? Many sites you visit places a “cookie” on your computer. A cookie is nothing wrong in itself, but it goes to show you that tracking devices can be placed on your computer without your knowledge, and in the wrong hands, can monitor your keyboard input, such as username, passwords, sites you’ve visited, and send that information back to the site that placed it there, or store up that information for a period of time, and then send it back, and use it anytime they wish.
What is needed is some form of protection on your computer that monitors activity coming in, and more importantly going out. Information going out, another term for uploading, can be your personal information being kidnapped. It wont be held for ransom, its just gone, and used against your will. So what kind of software should you select, and how much will it cost you?
According to a popular consumer support magazine, Trend Micro PC-cillin is the number one choice for monitoring your computer, best for preventing unwanted uploading of your personal information. Nothing is perfect, but having a top rated software tool working continuously in the background, is a minimum safety device for helping you prevent loss of personal information while on the Internet.
Already A Victim of Identity Theft?