Note: You have a one in ten chance of becoming the victim of identity theft this year. With this in mind, you need to make sure that you take all reasonable steps available to you to protect yourself from becoming the victim of identity theft. With this in mind, if you have detected that you may have become the victim of identity theft, one of the initial steps that you will want to take in response is to put a fraud alert on your credit reports. You will want to contact the three major credit reporting agencies and have them flag your accounts with these fraud alerts.

 

Fraud alerts do serve a very helpful purpose when it comes to protecting you from become a victim of identity theft or becoming re-victimized by an identity theft. When you ask the credit reporting agencies to place a fraud alert on your credit reports, when an attempt is made by an identity thief to open up new credit accounts in your name, the financial institution from which the credit or loan is being sought will see the credit alert and will proceed accordingly. For example, rather than issue a new credit card to the identity thief in your name, the financial institution will put the whole process on hold until the time that it can confirm that it really is you who is seeking this extension of credit – in this case, a credit card.

 

Despite the definite importance of fraud alerts, these alerts simply are not enough to clean up after you have become the victim of identity theft or to protect you from becoming the victim of identity theft in the future. Fraud alerts are one weapon in your arsenal that can be a part of your overall effort at responding to and preventing identity theft.

 

For example, if you have been the victim of identity theft, in addition to seeking and obtaining fraud alerts you absolutely must also file an appropriate police report. Moreover, you must notify each and every financial or similar type of institution or business through which you have an account. You need to make these types of individual notifications in the aftermath of becoming the victim of identity theft.

 

If you have not been the victim of identity theft per se, fraud alerts also represent one line of defense that can be helpful to you. But, you must maintain a vigilant and comprehensive approach to doing everything possible to protect your identity.

 



By: Bernard Pragides

About the Author:

Identity theft is when someone else assumes your personal information and poses as you. Therefore it’s not only just a question of stealing credit card numbers. There are several ways and places where your personal information can be stolen by the identity thieves.

There are four different categories of identity theft; they include business or commercial identity theft, identity cloning, criminal identity theft, and financial identity theft.

People use identity theft for different reasons. There are those who can use identity theft to blackmail someone, use it for terrorist activities, or illegal immigration. Identity cloning is mostly used for online credit card processing. Those who use identity theft for non financial purposes could use them to get attention for the victim’s achievement, which is also referred to as media identity theft.

Financial identity theft is mostly used for bank fraud whereby the identity thief is able to impersonate someone else and manage to obtain a loan from a financial institution by presenting all the accurate information of the victim to the bank, especially if the transaction is carried out online.

This type of crime is referred to as non-self-revealing and it’s quite common since the perpetrator doesn’t have to show his face. However, if the funds are released, the authorities can still be able to track down the criminal. Once the money is given, the financial institution is never paid back whereas the criminal keeps the money while the victim is accused of defaulting on a loan that was never authorized by the victim.

In cases of identity concealment and cloning, the criminal impersonates the victim by acquiring the victim’s personal identifiers for the sole reason of concealing himself from the authorities. This is mostly done by people working in foreign countries, a person who wants to avoid arrest or someone who wants to avoid other individuals or creditors.

This kind of identity theft crime is known to go on for a long period of time, and the perpetrator may go on to obtain fraudulent IDs that go as far as making the criminal more authentic .

Most of these criminals get the personal identifiers of their victims from dumpster diving, shoulder surfing, smart cards, or by infiltration of organizations that keep large amounts of personal information. Even social online network services that happen to expose the personal details of users can be an easy target for identity thieves.

When there is a serious breach of privacy, the possibility of a criminal getting your personal identifiers becomes much easier. As much as some of the personal identifiers are got through burglary or theft, the best strategy for potential victims is to protect themselves from such thieves by whatever means possible by ensuring that their personal information is safe and secure at all times. ?



By: Bill Protresi

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