Stay One Step Ahead - Tips to Protect Against Identity Theft
Here are some tips you can follow to help protect and secure your personal information and ensure that your identity or your credit have not been compromised.
1. Watch for over your shoulder when entering a PIN number or a credit card whether at work or at the ATM. Make sure that no one is watching.
2. Shred everything. One of the ways that would-be identity thieves acquire information is by digging through trash. If you are throwing out bills and credit card statements, medical statements or even junk-mail solicitations for credit cards, you may giving them all that they need to steal your identity. Invest in a personal shredder and shred all papers with any relevant information on them
3. Destroy digital information. When you get rid of an old computer system, or a hard drive, you need to take extra steps to ensure the data is completely, utterly and irrevocably destroyed. Simply deleting the data or reformatting the hard drive is not near enough. Anyone with a little technical skills can undelete files or recover data from a formatted drive. There are products on the market that destroy this information for good.
4. Always pay your bills at the post office or online. Never leave your paid bills in your mailbox to be sent out. Thieves steal from mailboxes all the time. This gives them access to all sorts of information like your name, address, credit account number, your bank information and a even a copy of your signature from your check for forgery purposes.
5. Analyze your credit report annually. You should review it to make sure the information on it is accurate and also make sure that there aren't any accounts on there that you aren't aware of or any other suspicious entries or activity.
6. Sign up for credit protection. New services like LifeLock promise to protect your identity with a million dollar guarantee. They have a proactive program to keep your identity is safe before anyone has the opportunity to use any of your information at all. They promise that if these "dumpster divers" get your information, it will be useless to them. They are so confident in their services that their CEO regularly publishes his real Social Security number and he's perfectly comfortable with it, because he knows that they have guaranteed his good name. It is a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Identity thieves are becoming increasing bold in efforts to steal your identity, but with these tips you will stay one step ahead.
Related Tags: identity theft protection, lifelock, life lock, personal identity theft, tips protect my identity
Eden Paul is a CPA and small business owner who strongly suggests using resources like LifeLock to protect you and your family. For more information, visit http://www.safeidentityreview.com
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