Thousands of individuals in America are subjected to immediate and serious financial problems each and every day due to identity theft. Because their personal information has been compromised in some way, they are victims of one of the most proliferating crimes in this country. However, to protect yourself and your confidential information, there are some free steps that you can take.
The Federal Trade Commission has stated that the most frequent consumer complaint is identity theft, and that it is the fastest growing crime in the country. The FBI has also stated that identity theft affected 9.91 million citizens in 2007. They have also stated that there are many more cases that probably were not reported, for whatever reason. They estimate that the total loss in 2007 approximates $52,600,000,000. Yes, that’s TRILLION dollars.
The blame for this calamity goes directly back to the US Congress, and their short sighted reasons for requiring use of our social security numbers as our primary identifier. Thanks to these brilliant thinkers, any unscrupulous individual can get another person’s social security number, and have access to bank accounts, credit cards and other financial records. They can even apply for new credit cards and have no problem in getting them. Countless Americans have had their credit and reputation literally destroyed, as well as losing their life savings. But guess what, the federal government, knowing about the problem, still invites these crimes to persist by continuing to require the use of our social security number as our primary identifier. It’s a very good idea to Get Details on who has Reviewed Your Credit Report. Click Here!
Many organizations, in a hurry to attempt to address identity fraud, have the mistaken opinion that monitoring someone’s credit is the complete solution to the problem. Unfortunately, monitoring credit is a small part of the solution, because an individual’s credit report informs you of identity theft after it has occurred. Many labor unions are trying to protect the financial security of its members and families, by strongly advising them to put identity theft high on their priority lists. The union members need to implement a wide selection of proactive as well as responsive components in order to be effective.
More often than not, hackers and other identity thieves target home computers of families. They know all too well that many individuals simply don’t have adequate security protection in place for their home PC’s that contain online banking information, etc. These individuals are easy prey for identity thieves who access the computers to steal money as well as confidential financial information. The also sometimes use your computer to mask their identity to hack into other individuals computers to steal their information.
Your credit report contains every bit of information that any identity thief needs to literally “rob you blind”. They will be able to access your existing accounts or create new credit cards in your name causing a financial nightmare. Credit bureaus are trying to reach a happy medium by keeping enough financial information in your active file to issue credit ratings for you, while keeping more sensitive information hidden to protect you from identity theft. However, all computer systems are not hacker proof, even after placing very high security standards in place. You read in the news frequently of hackers getting into large organizations, including the Veterans Administration earlier in the year. This type of large scale breach in data security is very serious because these thieves usually sell the information to other criminals and it becomes more widespread.
There are so many scams these thieves use, that it would fill a volume of pages. The most widely used one, and apparently most successful, is called “pretexting”. The identity thief will contact you by email or telephone posing as a representative of a bank, survey firm, or even some government agency. They will then ask that you “verify” certain information, and if the individual is gullible enough to fall for that, they then begin asking for full name, social security number, banks, etc.
There are several ways to protect yourself. Understand that your bank or the government is not going to contact you to verify information. There’s a large Delete button for an email and I always slam the phone down on this type of caller. Unfortunately, many individuals fall for this scam and pay the price for it. I personally did not realize that this problem was so prevalent, and after doing research and writing this article, I contacted LifeLock Identity Theft Prevention and purchased their service. The peace of mind is well worth the low cost.
