Hello all,
I hate to say it, but I'm the latest victim of identity theft. They tried to open three accounts in my name and were successfull in opening two. Fortunately, I was able to shut them down before any charges were made on them.

Anyway, in the last few days I've learned more about identity theft than I ever wanted to know. One piece of information that I thought I'd share with everyone is that if you put a fraud alert on your credit report, it will require the creditor to contact you before an account is open. This is what lifelock.com does for $9/month, but you can do it for free through Equifax and they'll notify the other two credit agencies to do the same. The catch is that you have to renew every 3 months for the free fraud alert, whereas as long as you pay lifelock, they'll automatically renew (I doubt it's worth $27, but for some it might be).

Here's the free website:
https://www.alerts.equifax.com/

Phillip

Sorry to hear this. I have put a fraud alert before, I believe the alert use to last a year but they have recently shortened it. In Some states you can permanently freeze your credit but it cast $10 for the freezing. But if one is not moving or applying for new credit it may just be worth it.

So how did you find out? I have been good at getting one free credit report every 4 months (4, 8, 12). Luckily I have not found any unauthorized activities.

Philip I could not agree with your suggestion and am sorry to hear about your situation. I too am familiar with putting the warning on your credit as it seems to be common place today for people (like myself) to get a letter in the mail from an old employer stating that "a laptop was stolen from our corporate headquarters that may or may not have contained my personal information." Consumer information collection companies are becoming more and more prevelant and important to the buisness world and if you perform a search youll find that these companies are often the targets of scam artists. What Philip suggests is a great idea and sadly a must in society today.

California is one of those states where you can put a permanent security freeze on your credit report. When the time comes when you want to apply for a new loan, you can "thaw" your data for either a specific time period, or for a specific lender. This costs $10 for each of the three reporting agencies.

I signed up for it when it first became available and urged all my friends and family to do so as well.

More info can be found at http://www.oispp.ca.gov/consumer_privacy/default.asp under "security freeze".

Sorry to hear that Phillip...how scary! In Feb. I found a debit transaction that I did not make, for $97.00. I called my bank & they paid it back to my account. I found it 1-2 days after it was made. They bought something online from ??? They cancelled my card & sent a new one. I asked how someone got my card # & fraud dept says they got lucky punching in #'s. How can this be??
How did they get you? Don't they need your ss #?