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.)