6 Signs Your Identity May Have Been Stolen
By Mitch Lipka, Consumer Ally
, AOL
No matter who you are or what measures you take to protect yourself, there's always a chance your identity could be stolen. Just ask Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, who was a victim last summer. Thieves can get your information by grabbing your wallet, taking your mail or, more impersonally, by extracting millions of credit card numbers at a time from stores at which you might have shopped.
Jaimee Napp
Up to nine million people a year fall victim to identity theft, according to the Federal Trade Commission. More than two-thirds of all victims have no idea where the thieves got their information, according to a recent survey of victims by the Identity Theft Assistance Center. Jaimee Napp vividly remembers the day she learned her identity had been stolen. She received a message from a credit card company whose card she had canceled a couple of months earlier. Assuming they had botched the process of closing the account, she called back.
"They said that the records they had and the new application I submitted last week didn't match," Napp recalled. "I said I didn't file an application. As soon as I said that I knew something wasn't right."
Then the credit card company asked her whether she had opened several other accounts recently. She hadn't. Napp immediately got copies of her credit reports in order to find out how much damage had already been done.
"You just really start to panic because you don't know the full extent of what has happened," Napp said.
In some ways, Napp was lucky. Not everyone gets a phone call alerting them that someone is using their credit. Often victims find out that someone has infiltrated their personal information after thousands of dollars in charges have already been incurred.
To help you catch identity thieves early, here are six warning signs that someone has hijacked your name and credit:
· Unexplained charges appear on your credit card
· Bills that you regularly receive stop arriving in the mail
· Accounts are opened in your name that you didn't open
· Information on your credit report doesn't make sense
· Credit cards arrive that you did not sign up for
· You get denied credit -- or receive particularly poor terms -- for no apparent reason
· Bills that you regularly receive stop arriving in the mail
· Accounts are opened in your name that you didn't open
· Information on your credit report doesn't make sense
· Credit cards arrive that you did not sign up for
· You get denied credit -- or receive particularly poor terms -- for no apparent reason
Some of these red flags offer earlier warnings than others. It can take a while, for instance, to notice that a bill hasn't arrived in a while -- and that a crook may have changed the billing address on your credit card so you won't notice any mystery charges right away. Most credit cards allow consumers to view their accounts online throughout the billing period -- allowing a far faster detection of unexpected charges.
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As a matter of course, you should also regularly check your credit report, which you can obtain for free from www.annualcreditreport.com -- a site sponsored by the three major credit reporting agencies: Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. You can receive one free report from each of these agencies once a year. By checking your report once every four months, you can more readily detect any unusual activity or abuses of your credit. The reports will also alert you if any accounts have been opened in your name.
Napp aggressively used this type of information to advocate for herself and limit further damage. Unlike most identity theft cases, police managed to arrest the woman -- a manager at a former place of employment -- who stole detailed information from Napp's personnel file and assumed her identity.
As executive director of Nebraska's Identity Theft Action Council, Napp now works to help protect others from identity theft. Her first piece of advice: Don't make it easy for criminals to steal your information. Only mail letters at the post office or U.S. Postal Service mailboxes, rather than leaving them in your own box to be picked up, she says. Also, limit the contents in your wallet to only the necessities.
"A lot of people carry too much personal information in their wallets – like their Social Security card," Napp said.
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2009-10-16 14:26:12
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