Hopefully Identity Theft will never happen to you. You are making the right choices with your password and your access, you are keeping track of your credit cards and reviewing the transactions and statements, your paper mail is destroyed, you monitor your credit reports.
You pay attention to your private information and keep it secure.
But sometimes, despite the best efforts, identity theft occurs. If it happens to you, or someone you know, it is important to take steps to correct the damage and limit your risk of recurrence in the future.
The first thing to do is assess the damage. Review your credit cards, bank accounts, credit reports, and any other financial access points to locate any fraudulent activity.
You may want to freeze your credit reports to control access. I discussed how to do this in a prior blog post.
While you are freezing your credit report, you may want to have them put on a fraud alert as well. This can be done via the same link used for freezing your credit report and you may want to do it for each credit bureau.
Contact any creditor that was affected by fraudulent activity. This includes creditors that you have valid accounts with and those where new accounts were set up by the identity theft.
Change all of your pins and passwords.
Dispute any and all false charges and transactions with the creditors and make sure to review all three credit reports to ensure that the information is corrected and updated.
You can recover from identity theft. It takes time and effort.
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