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Identity theft

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The incidents of identity theft in the law enforcement reports are dismaying. Happily, there are some key steps to significantly protecting personal information. Hopefully this is helpful:

1. Obtain credit reports regularly. Credit reporting companies provide free credit reports to consumers annually.

2. Implement a credit freeze. Credit reporting companies implement free credit freezes. A credit freeze will slow your ability to obtain new lines of credit but will significantly impair a criminal’s ability to abuse your credit.

3. Be extremely careful clicking links and opening attachments. If anything is remotely weird about an email or a text, delete it. If you’re not sure, call the number of the company or individual from your contacts list or from the website, not from the suspicious communication. If you did click on something and think it might be malicious, call the fraud department of the entity the communication was imitating. They want to protect your information as well as their network.

4. Don’t give your personal information to criminals. Scams can involve emails or text messages asking customers to call a phone number. The sincere and charming criminal who answers the phone will explain they need to update account information for some completely understandable reason. The “technical support” scam consists of computers freezing and displaying a message from a “computer security firm” that they can help you if you call their phone number. The computer has not been hacked; the hacker is simply sending so many refresh requests to your computer that the screen froze. The solution is the time-honored “turn it off and turn it back on.”

Cover your hand when you put your PIN into anything. Criminals use carefully hidden micro cameras to steal PINs.