Without becoming a victim of identity theft, you can get a free credit report from each of the three credit reporting agencies once a year. Federal law requires the three major credit reporting agencies to provide these free reports annually. To satisfy their obligations, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion jointly have established www.annualcreditreport.com, where you can order your free credit reports.

You can also call them at 1-877-322-8228 or write to them at Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. Because the material in your credit reports is usually largely redundant across these three companies, stagger your requests over the year and rotate between the three firms. If there is any problem with your credit report, it usually will show up on any of your reports from these three firms.

(Avoid using any of those obnoxious free credit report copycat companies, such as “freecreditreport.com,” that advertise on TV, but will only supply “free” credit reports, when you pay a lot for their other supposedly valuable premium services. Also, if you are a woman, you probably have already figured out these freecreditreport.com TV advertisers are not to be trusted. Incredibly cluelessly, their TV ads always blame the bride’s bad credit for young guitar playing slacker hubby having to work at a pirate themed fast food job. What a clueless company marketing department to insult the female half of their target audience with their advertising budget! Have they written off women because women shop and are too smart to pay for something that is supposed to be free? Free credit reporting my keister! This is another confirmation that the Federal Communications Commission is dead at the wheel with respect to consumer protections. Companies can get away with confusing people, screaming “free, free, free,” and then charging people for something that they have a legal right to get for free, if they just knew the correct web address.}

Identity Theft Events Provide Opportunities to Lock Down Reporting about Your Credit

While identity theft is a large and growing problem and can be very costly and inconvenient to you, it is just a business cost and headache to financial and retail firms, who also have benefited greatly from the proliferation of easy credit.

One way to protect yourself is to put restrictions on your credit records with the three major credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. These credit reporting companies have made profitable businesses on both sides. They charge fees to business firms who may not always treat your financial information carefully, and they charge you fees when you want to restrict access to your financial information in their data bases.

For some, these credit information access restriction fees go away when you become an identity theft victim. Whether or not you lose money, if you become a victim of identity theft, this may actually be an opportunity for some of you. In some states, like California, identity theft victims can get long-term locks put on their accounts without having to pay fees to the three credit bureaus.

California Residents Can Get a Free Fraud Alert for Seven Years Following Even a Minor Fraud Event

If you live in California and have become a victim of identity theft, you have rights under California law as an identity theft victim to have your credit files frozen for seven years without paying fees to the credit reporting agencies for such a long-term “fraud alert.” For example, if your credit card shows suspicious charges that you did not make and even if your credit card company takes them off your statement, you still can make an identity theft report to your local police and get a police report. With this police report and by writing to the appropriate addresses and following the procedures, the three credit reporting agencies are obligated legally to put long-term fraud alerts on your credit reports.

The downside of locking your credit report is that you cannot yourself apply and be approved immediately for instant credit. The good news is that nobody else can do the same for seven years, as well. (Note that if you do need to apply for a credit card or refinance a mortgage, you still can do so, but the credit lock on your account just creates a delay. You have to proactively contact the credit bureaus to inform them of the validity your efforts to apply for more credit.)

Lock Up Your Credit at the Credit Reporting Agencies

The upside to locking your credit report is that new attempts to establish credit in your name are blocked without your permission. Not only does that mean that criminals cannot open new credit cards in your name, it means that you have greater protection from other kinds of credit related crimes. For example, the credit crisis has spawned a crime wave of mortgage and real estate line of credit frauds.

Criminals have opened credit lines in home owners names and then have quickly drained the credit lines of their funds. In addition, homes have been sold without the home owners knowledge and sometimes the knowledge even of the “buyer” who also had his or her identity stolen and was an unwitting participant in the transaction.

Obviously, it is better to prevent costly situations like these than clean them up. In addition, pay close attention to any document sent to you by your county registrar. Because of increasing real estate fraud some county registrars, including Los Angeles County, now send notices to the address of record whenever any deed or other records change is filed with them.

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You should take the potential for financial identity theft very seriously, as a threat to your financial security. Identity theft can sometimes entail loss of your financial assets, whether small or large. However, very often it requires taking a very large amount of your time to rectify an identity theft breach. Given the interconnectedness of the personal asset and personal credit system, any breech of your financial identity can have very time consuming ramifications, and the value of your time can many times exceed the value of the money that might have been stolen from you or from some firm through your stolen identity. Furthermore, once your identity is “out on the black market” you are more vulnerable to subsequent attacks. Taking certain steps to prevent an occurrence of identity theft in the first place is prudent. This is why identity theft prevention is a key, but often overlooked, component of a prudent financial plan.

Protection Practices for Sensitive Information and Passwords on Banking, Mutual Fund, Investment, and other Financial Websites

As you set up Internet accessible financial accounts, be very careful with your financial information. Furthermore, as you utilize the Internet it is important that you use what are known as “strong” passwords with more characters (combinations of letters, numbers, special symbols, upper and lower cases). Vary your passwords from one account to another. Never use the same password across your important financial sites. It is much better to maintain list of different passwords that you carefully protect at home, rather than to use a single weak or even strong password across various financial websites. Furthermore, it is a good practice to vary your user name from one account to another. In effect, different user names and different passwords in combination make your identity on any single site much more secure.

Therefore, it is recommended by security authorites that all your financial passwords for your on-line accounts be both strong and different. Many identity thieves are clever and sophisticated. Furthermore, there is a cyber underground and internet black market where compromised identity information is shared, bought, and sold. This cyber crime underground stretches around the world. When your user names and passwords are both strong and different, you could avoid a single identity breach from cascading across your other financial accounts.

Avoid using more sensitive information, such as mother’s maiden name or your city/state/date of birth, for example, as your answer to security challenge questions on any ordinary, non-financial website.  Reserve this information only for those sites that hold your financial accounts and your financially sensitive information. Simply assume that the vast majority of websites have absolute amateurs in charge of their website systems architecture and security. While this may not be true of any given website that attempts to collect sensitive information from you, assuming that the site security is poor is a wiser assumption, because you never know which site could be the weak link. Systems administrators of financial web sites tend to be much more sophisticated concerning security affairs, but they certainly are not infallible. Furthermore, all it takes is one corrupt employee at firm with strong or weak web systems security, to circumvent any protections that are in place.

Deal with Financial Services Company and Non-Financial Websites

With less important and non-financial web sites that require registration, you could use the same username and the same easily remembered strong password. However, it would be very wise never provide these sites with any additional information that is accurate about your name, address, phones, the security challenge answers above and other potentially sensitive information. Always assume that security on any of these “unimportant” web sites could be breached and that your password information could be used to access other accounts elsewhere. By drawing a strong distinction between the user names and passwords that you use on financial and other sites that are important to you versus those unimportant sites requiring registration information, you can in part firewall yourself from security breaches in the less well managed part of the Internet. Why supply via perhaps a forum registration to some hobby web site your actual name, address, etc. And, certainly do not supply your date of birth or mother’s maiden name as the answer to the security challenge questions. If that forum website’s membership database is breached you will have supplied key information needed to breach the financial accounts that are really important to you.

Access to your personal email system or systems should require a strong and different password. Stored email messages can contain passwords for which a thief could search. Furthermore, on your home computer systems, you should always have a fully functioning firewall and up-to-date anti-virus/anti-spyware software that is always on.

Take these issues seriously. Cyber crime is worldwide, cooperative, and increasing sophisticated. Since it is highly profitable and risks of criminal prosecution are low, do you think this problem is going to go away. The prudent thing to do is to keep identity theft away from your door, if you can.

Avoid Phishing and Other Impersonation Attacks

Avoid phishing of all kinds. For example, never provide any personal data of any kind in response to a link provided to you via email. Always ensure that the URL of the site you are using is the correct URL. If you are ever in doubt, type in the URL yourself or search for the site on Google and then enter the site with the link from Google.

Furthermore, never enter any financial information or other sensitive information into any website that does not use the secure “https” protocol (note the “s” added to “http”). When buying over the Internet with a credit card or otherwise, if a site does not use https, do not use it. Use only one credit card when buying on the web. If that credit card is compromised, you can close that credit account number and replace the card.

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