Identity Theft Protection

Identity fraud normally occurs when the victim has absolutely no knowledge or control over what’s happening to them. Think of all the places where you have made a purchase with your credit card, either at a department store, restaurant or online. There is nothing stopping a dishonest employee from stealing your information or it could simply be careless handling of your information by the organization where they don’t secure their files properly and misuse easily occurs. Here are some identity theft protection tips to practice as a matter of habit:

Limit the number of items you carry in your purse or wallet

Losing your wallet or your purse easily becomes an opportunity for someone to commit identify theft. It’s a bad habit to carry your social security card, your driver’s license and all of your credit cards along with receipts and notes in the same wallet. No one ever realizes how risky this is until they lose their wallets. Another unfortunate mistake people make is to have the numbers for the credit card companies written on a piece of paper that was in their wallet or purse. Identity thieves are as opportunistic as they are resourceful.

Keep bills, financial statements and other sensitive personal information locked up at home

One of the places you never think about losing your identity is in your own home. We often leave bills and bank statements laying around kitchen counters, desks etc. If you never allow anyone into your home then you’re probably ok. But if you have visitors like contractors, cleaners etc who come to work for you in your home, you need to make sure you’re not exposing your sensitive data to anyone.

Shred anything that contains your name, address and financial information

Shredding machines are rather inexpensive. To some people this may sound like a hassle but it is so important to make sure that none of your unwanted statements leave your house in one piece. Some identity thieves still resort to “dumpster-diving”, which basically means they will dig through trash, as a way to gather any information they can use. In order to minimize the amount of paper statements, you can also request from all your financial institutions that they take you off of paper statements and have your statements emailed to you instead. The same thing goes for utilities and phone services.

Do not open spam email

The reason why spam has not gone away and will probably never go away is because it is still a very popular way to market, and recipients still open these emails. Spam mail is a prime avenue for identify theft, as it often contains viruses and other malicious code that can run as a background process and gather information while you’re active online. These malicious programs are an attempt to collect personal information from unknowing internet users with the purpose of harvesting their personal identities.

Credit card skimming

Whenever you pay with your credit card make sure you keep an eye on the person running the transaction for you, this is an opportunity for someone to skim your card. Skimmers are devices about the size of a credit card that someone can swipe your card through to read your card’s information to be used later. Whenever possible pay with cash and it is always a good idea to not sign the back of your credit cards but instead write the words “please check my ID”. Credit card theft is one of the easiest to do because credit card numbers are often mishandled.

Know who is calling you or emailing you requesting your information

Phishing is still a popular way of acquiring personal identity information, whenever you receive emails that appear to be from financial or insurance companies make sure you read them carefully. If they prompt you to submit any of your information as a way to verify your account, simply delete the email. Financial institutions DO NOT request your information via emails or phone calls, they already have it. Rather than surrender this information when they call you ask questions to find out exactly who they are. Should the request sound legitimate contact the toll free number from the organization’s website and call them to verify.

Take your name off marketing lists

If you’re not aware of the national Do-not-call registry, visit their website (https://www.donotcall.gov/), this is an act that protects you from getting calls from most telemarketers.

Review your credit card statements and check your credit report often

Reviewing your credit card and bank statements can give you some early detection when you see charges that you do not recognize. You also need to check your credit report often and make sure you setup free fraud alerts. These will tell you when changes have occurred to your credit report and this is a clue to investigate what the change is, especially if you have not initiated anything.

Report suspicious activity

Should the worse happen and you fall victim of identity fraud, do not wait to contact your credit card companies or banks immediately to freeze your accounts and keep further charges from taking place. You should also report the incident with the credit bureaus and ask them to put fraud alerts on your file, and finally contact your local police department and ask them to fill out a police report on the identity theft crime that you’ve been a victim of.

Sign up for credit monitoring / identity theft protection

Although you’re able to accomplish most of what these services can do on your own, it simply is not practical enough for a single person to monitor their credit or identity 24/7. These highly specialized services make use of state of the art technology to monitor the identities of millions of subscribers and provide them with accurate and prompt alerts when suspicious activity is taking place involving their identity.

Credit monitoring is an essential part of measuring the accuracy of your credit entries and keeping a healthy credit score. Various sources have estimated that up to 80% of consumer credit reports are inaccurate. The FACTA act of 2004 (Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act) makes it possible for consumers to get a free copy of their credit reports once a year from all three credit bureaus to provide an opportunity for consumers to dispute inaccuracies.

But, is credit monitoring enough to battle identity theft? Can this measure alone help you protect your identity properly? Credit monitoring services may insist that this is the best way prevent identity theft and although it is an important aspect of identity theft protection, it alone is not a comprehensive system for total protection against credit fraud or other types of identity theft.

Total Identity theft protection includes a lot more than credit monitoring, it’s safe to say that the two go hand and hand. Credit monitoring is a step within an identity theft protection plan or service, but it is not a plan by itself. Your credit report alone is not the only place where identity theft can be spotted, there are many other aspects about your identity, such as medial benefits, social security, your name and address change, online security, your mail etc. Identity theft can strike at any one of these fronts.

Disadvantages of credit monitoring?

Credit monitoring may cost you an average of $200 to $400 a year, for a service that will essentially track changes to your credit reports and detect credit fraud or the potential of it. Monitoring your own credit is something you can do on your own by placing fraud alerts on your credit reports with all three credit bureaus and inspecting your credit entries once every quarter. But for the busy individual of today this is time consuming and rather impractical.

This service will not be able to stop someone from using your social security number in other ways, such as opening utility accounts or phone and wireless accounts under your name. Credit monitoring alone can not protect your identity from medical benefits theft. Even though identity theft insurance is often included with this service, in the case of medical records and benefits, the consequences often can not be resolved with monetary assistance.

If you’re interested in going with credit monitoring services, you should know that you may be charged extra for the monitoring of your credit score, there may also be an allotted number of credit reports and score requests per membership year and any additional ones you request will cost you extra.

Some credit monitoring agencies may claim to offer total credit fraud protection but you need to know if they actually monitor all three credit bureaus or just one, also they may not monitor and review your credit as often as they advertise unless you actually request it. So it’s important to ask what they monitor, how often and from what sources.

Why complete identity theft protection is a better choice

As we aleady mentioned, Identity theft does not only include your credit, it can strike from any angle. You have to realize that your information is out there. Your name, address, and social security number are widely distributed around many different organizations, financial institutions, insurance companies, HR records, public records etc. These are the aspects that can be covered by a complete and sophisticated system of identity theft protection.

If you’re already considering outsourcing the monitoring of your personal information, then don’t hit the “buy” button yet. In order to protect your identity completely, you need to first assess your own identity. Where is your personal information now? Who has your information? Have you ever had a second thought about rendering your personal information, even when you had no choice?

Fraud is everywhere and that’s why your best alternative is to consider a system of identity protection with cutting edge technology that not only watches after your credit accounts, but monitors the thriving online financial black markets where thousands of credit card accounts, social security numbers and other personal information are traded.

When you become a subscriber of identity theft protection services you get not only the benefit listed above, but many other points of identity protection like:

• Renewable fraud alerts
• Removal of your name from junk mail lists and pre-approved credit offers
• Lost or Stolen wallet assistance
• Identity theft recovery assistance
• Monitoring of utility and phone accounts in your name
• Internet and PC security software
• An insurance policy at no extra cost

These and other features are offered with your subscription to identity theft protection services from Trusted ID, Life Lock and Identity Truth. All of which offer a much more affordable and comprehensive suite of security features than credit monitoring alone.

Here’s a handy list of things you need to be doing to protect your identity, especially if you’re not currently subscribing to identity theft protection services.

1. Shred your documents – anything that you intend to throw away, like old tax returns, old bills, mail offers, pre-approved offers and anything that contains your social security number, name, address, phone numbers etc should be shredded and not thrown away. Throwing this type of documentation away whole is simply creating  an opportunity for identity thieves who willingly dig through trash to find information like this to commit fraud.
2. Watch out for Phishing Scams – whenever you get unsolicited emails asking you for information such as account verification for credit or bank accounts you own, you should immediately know that these are phishing scams. Often, these emails will end up in your junk mail folders, which you should delete regularly and never open. Usually the emails are constructed to sound urgent and it’s easy for someone who does not know any better to take the bite. Just delete them.
3. Set Fraud Alerts – If you suspect that you may have exposed your identity more than you should have, or if you think you’re at risk of identity theft for whatever reason, you can contact the credit bureaus and set fraud alerts on your credit files. This will require any merchants running credit checks on your file to take additional steps to verify your identity by contacting you directly. If you don’t use your credit a lot, you may want to consider putting a credit freeze on your credit files. This will prevent even you from opening new accounts, so make sure you won’t be needing your credit before you do this.
4. Protect your identity online – everything you do online can be traced back to you and the traffic that comes in and out of your computer can be easily sniffed and decoded, so protecting your home PC against this is necessary. It is recommended that you have both spyware protection and firewall software installed on your system to make protect you from intrusion. A firewall can help you become invisible and spyware protection will keep unwanted and dangerous code from penetrating your system.
5. Create complex passwords – this is something you should practice on everything you do online and in your PC. Always use comples passwords, this means you need to construct alphanumeric passwords that are only significant to you. If the interface you’re using allows special characters then use special characters as well. The more complex the password the harder it is to crack.
6. Clean out your wallet – many people have the bad habit of carrying their entire lives in their wallets, this is never an issue until they lose their wallets. This can easily become the worst day of your life, so start by taking your social security card out of your wallet and keeping it at home in a fire safe. Next, you should only carry a debit card and one credit card in your wallet, your drivers license and any membership cards as long as they don’t show too much information about you.
7. Get a P.O. Box address – if your mail box does not have a lock, you may want to consider getting a P.O. Box Address, this is easy pickings for identity thieves looking for any information they can use to cash in on your information.
8. Opt out of marketing lists and pre-approved offers – these can be dangerous, especially if you do not have a lock on your mail box. Credit bureaus and credit card companies give themselves the liberty of trading your information and this can potentially hurt you if the information ends up in the wrong hands. Follow the instructions on our identity theft prevention guide to opt out.
9. Check your credit report often – this is an important way to stay on top of your finances, but it is also a way to catch any inaccuracies and any fraud that may occur regarding your information. The ideal frequency should be quarterly, but a safer approach is to do it every other month to quickly spot fraud before it gets out of hand.
10. Be proactive and consistent – never let down your guard. When you hand somebody your credit card keep an eye on them and make sure it isn’t being skimmed. Cover the keypad with your other hand when you enter your pin number at the ATM or a store. Never volunteer information unnecessarily and always review your credit, bank and medical insurance statements to make sure everything is in order.

When identity theft protection services first became available they were marketed pretty aggressively, and it is perhaps due to these efforts that consumers may have looked past the actual benefit of the offers and gone to dismiss the announcements as yet another product pedaled by financial companies.

With the ongoing threat of identity theft, by now more and more people are starting to pay attention to the possible consequences of identity theft should it happen to them. So they’re probably now wondering, do identity theft protection services really work? Do I really need to spend the money to outsource protecting my identity? There unfortunately isn’t a straight answer to these questions. The needs, lifestyles and risks vary too much.

Identity theft cases are constantly in the news and the incidents vary from city clerks involved in criminal rings that steal identities to parents stealing the identities of their own children. People you do business with and those around you are as much likely to be the thieves as someone half way around the world.

If identity theft is a real concern for you, consider first taking on the task of implementing proactive and continuous efforts to secure your own identity. You can first start by following our own “Identity Theft Prevention Guide”, which is available for free to all our readers. This short guide will provide you with a basic list of things you need to be doing right now to protect your own identity.

The guide will prove that many of the prevention steps an identity theft protection company will do for you, you can do yourself. The difference in the two is the accuracy and effectiveness of their state of the art technology that helps to provide services that no individual can provide for themselves.

If the tasks listed on the guide are more than you can handle, then you need to consider outsourcing the task and this can prove beneficial and effective for your overall protection.

What identity theft protection services do:
•    Monitor credit reports to detect suspicious activities
•    Place and renew fraud alerts on your credit files with all three credit bureaus
•    Monitor online identity black markets
•    Assist when you lose your wallet or purse
•    Remove your name from unwanted mail/marketing lists
•    Opt you out of pre-approved credit offers
•    Provide medical benefits protection (only Trusted ID so far)
•    Extend protection for your family as well (Trusted ID and Identity-Truth)

These and other security features are automated for you so you don’t have to do it yourself. However the biggest benefit of these services besides the peace of mind you get from knowing you’re protected is the insurance policy or service warranty, which can range from $20,000 to $1,000,000 in case your identity does get compromised.

So do these services work? Yes they work, however they’re not 100% safe since identity thieves are becoming more and more resourceful and criminal rings are resorting to unconventional methods of identity theft which include bribing social workers, medical staff and financial clerks. It is best that you have some level of protection that includes a policy that will help you monetarily recover from an incident.