Identity Theft
Canyon Hills 92532
Protect Yourself From Identity Theft
Shred everything, even mailing labels on store catalogs. Shred everything with your signature on it. Get the best shredder ("S ecurity Micro Cut").
Get a Credit Monitoring Service. It should cost less than $10 per month. Make sure they monitor all three credit bureaus 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and notify you immediately when there is a problem (not once per quarter).
Avoid debit cards when you have credit cards available. Federal law provides little or no liability on illegal charges on a credit card.
Have two passwords, one for shopping and one for banking. Change them every year. Make them difficult to guess.
by Frank Abagnale, current FBI security consultant
Good passwords use upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters, and longer better than shorter. Avoid recognizable words or names.
Pay more attention to passwords for your financial information that provides access to banking, retirement, brokers, etc and don't use the same password for all of them. Don't leave credit card info on shopping sites that you visit infrequently. Don't use the same passwords.
Take special care when writing down passwords for financial type sites. You might have an easy log of passwords on sites that have no financial or credit card information. If someone breaks into your house and recovers your password document, you could be in real trouble and you will be liable for all activity until you report the theft to the various agencies.