Filed under: Identity Theft Prevention | Tags: credit monitoring, data breach, Identity Theft Prevention
About 24 million customers have signed up for credit monitoring services. For about $100 per year, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion state they can protect you from identity theft by regularly watching for changes in your credit report. Unfortunately, credit monitoring only informs you about new financial account fraud which accounts for only about 25% of identity fraud.
- Credit Monitoring often only monitors one credit bureau. Since creditors don’t always report to all three credit bureaus, you may be missing out on important notifications.
- Speed of notification is a problem. Some credit monitoring services report only once per week. In addition, delays in reporting information by the credit bureaus means notifications could take up to 45 days to go out. Consumers need information quickly if their identities are in jeopardy.
- Credit monitoring is reactive and not proactive. It doesn’t stop the issuance of credit to an identity thief. It only notifies that someone has opened an account in your name or has inquired about credit in your name.
Unfortunately, companies are lured into buying credit monitoring services for those affected by a data breach so it will appear as if they are doing something to protect the affected.
A change of mindset is necessary to effectively stop identity theft. Fortunately, companies are beginning to realize that employee training is imperative to lowering the risk of identity theft for their employees and data breach for their companies.
Instead of paying for credit monitoring, do the monitoring yourself by ordering copies of your credit report from all three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion) and review them carefully. Credit reports can be accessed for free without having to sign up for any monitoring. Click here for more details.
Four months after ordering the first bureau report, order a copy of your report from the next bureau, and four months after that, the third credit bureau. This way, you get a free copy every four months. Review the reports carefully for any unexpected activity or accounts you don’t recognize.
Adding a fraud alerts to your credit report warns potential creditors to contact you by phone before granting credit in your name. Would you rather
- Get a phone call from a credit asking if you applied for credit or
- Wait to get an email from a credit monitoring service letting you know an account has been opened in your name?
I think the answer is obvious.
For more Identity Theft prevention tips, go to www.identitydoctor.com/identity_theft_information
