Credit Crads
Identity Theft
Get Off the List: Protect your information and save a few trees
• Stop unsolicited credit card offers by blocking your name from prescreening by
the credit bureaus. Call 888-5OPT-OUT and all three major credit reporting agencies
will be notified that you don’t want to receive these offers.
• End telemarketing calls by signing up for the Federal Trade Commission's National
Do Not Call Registry. National Do Not Call Registry,
www.donotcall.gov, (888) 382-1222.
You may want to register for your state’s Do Not Call registry if available.
• Consider an unlisted phone number, or at least ask the phone company to list your
name in the phone book with only an initial and no address.
• Opt-out of letting companies share your information. You should get annual privacy
notices from financial institutions you do business with. Take a minute to read
them and say no if you don’t want them to share your information. There will be
instructions for “opting out.”
Safer Surfing: If you’re not careful, your computer can be like an unlocked
door into your home
- Use a firewall on your home computer. These are often inexpensive, and well worth
it. If you are connected all the time to the Internet via a cable modem or DSL,
it’s especially impor tant to be protected.
- Block your phone number from reverse directories such as Anywho.com (www.anywho.com/help/privacy_list.html)
and US
Search: (www.ussearch.com/wlcs/commerce/about/ privacy.jsp).
- Choose good passwords. Don’t use your social security number, address, dates of
you or your children’s birth, etc. The best pass words use letters and numbers,
but don’t be obvious (your child’s name and date of birth, for example).
- Watch user names, too. Don’t use email addresses or user names that give away valuable
personal information. For example, a user name of Hannah1199 might indicate you
have a daughter named Hannah born in November 1999. Do you really want strangers
knowing that?
- Beware of "phishing." With this scam, companies use email or fake websites to collect
personal information from consumers. Thousands of consumers have fallen victim to
the “PayPal” and “BestBuy” email scams, for example, where they allegedly received
emails from these companies, asking them to log in and update their information.
The sites were operated by fraudsters, but looked real. Always log into financial
sites from the home page you usually use, and check out suspicious emails at sites
devoted to exposing email hoaxes, such as http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/ or www.truthorfiction.org
before responding to emails like this.
- Think twice before providing sensitive personal information online. In some scams,
consumers have been duped into “applying for loans” on fake websites designed only
to gather consumer information. In other cases, companies have sold information
gathered from consumers, without their permission, to outside companies. Make sure
the website is reputable before you type in your social security number or other
identifying information.
- Free isn’t always good. Another recent scam involves sites offering “free” credit
reports, which instead harvest information that can be used for identity theft.
Visit the Federal Trade Commission’s website at www.ftc.gov for more information
on how to protect yourself from this scam.
- Shop carefully. Deal with merchants that have secure websites, and are reputable.
For the maximum protection, always use a credit card rather than debit or check
card when dealing with a new merchant online.
- Teach your children about online privacy and make sure they understand they are
not to give out any personal information without your permission first.
- Before you trash a computer, make sure your information is no longer available to
someone who may pick it up from the trash or a charity. Purchase a program that
“wipes” your computer clean or physically destroy the hard drive. (Simply deleting
files will not be sufficient.)
