Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft

Identity theft is a constant threat for almost everyone. If you have a social security number, then you are burdened with the need to protect it from being compromised. If someone gains your personal information, they can use it to do all sorts of malicious things that will completely mess up your credit and your finances. Victims of identity theft frequently end up spending months upon months settling all of the problems that arise from having their identity stolen. Sometimes you can even end up owing a great deal of money. So, you should do everything you can to protect yourself.

First, you should take pre-emptive measure to prevent your information from getting in the hands of thieves. Never throw away sensitive documents that contain things like social security numbers, bank account numbers, or anything else related to your finances. Instead, run them through the shredder, or dispose of them in some other way that renders them unreadable. This will take care of many chances that a thief would have to get your data.

You should also be careful when doing anything on the computer. Phishing is when a hacker simulates a web site that you trust, for the purpose of getting you to enter your personal data. You could also fall victim to a keylogger, which transmits everything you enter to the hacker. So, you should equip your computer with the latest anti-virus software in order to protect yourself from these threats.

Never save your login ids and passwords onto your computer. If a Trojan program enters your computer, it will harvest all this data and sends to the thief. If you have too many login ids and passwords and can’t remember them, you can write them down in some personal diary and keep it under lock and key. This information should not be known even your family members.

Use a disposable email account. Keep your business or personal email account just for business or personal communication. If you are going to be making purchases online, joining newsgroups, or subscribing to mailing lists and ezines use a disposable email account. There are many online free accounts such as yahoo, hotmail or grail, and most of them can interface with popular email clients like outlook or outlook express. Use one of them for all of your shopping transactions. Further, in these disposable email accounts, don’t use your own name or date of birth/year of birth.

When you make purchases online make sure your transactions are secure. In the address bar you should see “https” and not “http”. There should also be small lock icon in your browser. If this is your first purchase from the company make sure the issuing company is someone you have heard of like Verisign, or Thawte.

Check a company’s privacy policy. When you make your first transaction make sure your check the privacy policy, look for logos from consumer groups like Trust-E and the better business bureau. Click the logos to make sure they are authentic.

Never open or fill out email requests for you to update you account or credit card settings via email. These are ‘phishing’ scams people use to try and secure your personal information. Many of them are growing increasingly sophisticated and go to great lengths to look exactly like the company’s website using their exact logo.

You may also choose to get identity theft insurance in the event that your data is stolen somehow. Identity theft insurance costs around $20-30 per month. If you have your identity stolen, it will cover many of the costs involved in recovering. They will pay for things like phone charges, mailing charges, attorney costs, and fees incurred from the companies that you deal with during your attempt to recover your identity.

You can find many other resources for preventing or dealing with identity theft. The Identity Theft Resource Center is a non-profit organization with a web site located at http://www.idtheftcenter.org/. They have countless tips on how to deal with all steps of identity theft: how to prevent it from happening, how to initiate the recovery process, and how to safeguard yourself against future attacks on your identity. So, look into it, and make sure that you are doing everything you can to prevent it from happening to you.