Identity Theft Can Happen to You
It happened to me. Back in the summer of 2005 I got a call from my bank to tell me that an internal “alarm” had been triggered due to a high number of checks being cashed against my account within a three-day period.
It turns out that someone has my bank account information, social security number, and other personal information. A woman had a driver’s license from another state made up with my name and information, but her photograph. She used it to cash a series of high dollar amount checks against my checking account. The checks had been written from someone’s closed account – probably on checks that had been discarded at some point.
Now, in the end it looked like it may have been an inside job. My bank covered all of the losses, but that did not save me from having to file police reports and credit alerts; and I spent hours cancelling credit cards. It was insane and anxiety-ridden.
My point is that identity theft can happen to you. It happened to me and I am very careful about documents and personal information.
When the whole thing happened to me, numerous friends e-mailed me the link to that Free Credit Report.com site. I guess all of the advertising had made them think it was my first line of defense. The problem is that I am one savvy shopper and the first thing that occurred to me is that FreeCreditReport.com is not actually free.
Although everyone is indeed entitled to a free credit report annually, you don’t have to use that particular website to get it. (Use AnnualCreditReport.com instead.) Freecreditreport.com is actually owned by one of the three credit reporting agencies – Experian – and they are pushing their fee-based credit monitoring services.
Bob Sullivan wrote an excellent article on the matter for MSNBC and I urge you to check it out.
If you are looking at credit report monitoring, that is another issue. Monitoring services can be a fantastic help and the protection can be worth its weight in gold. Lifelock is far less expensive to use than the above-mentioned company, and they guarantee their services up to a million bucks. My favorite part of their program is that they will also monitor for uses of my daughter’s name or personal information.
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