Help Protect Yourself

You may have wondered how to help protect yourself from identity theft, particularly if you know folks who’ve experienced it. They’ll tell you that being an identity theft victim can be an unsettling experience and recovery can take a lot of time and effort. Hearing such stories could be reason enough for you to try to avoid becoming a victim yourself. In this article, we’ll cover what information identity thieves are after and why it’s important to them. We’ll also explain what they can do with the information they obtain and how you can help protect yours. And we’ll tell you what you can do if you ever become the unfortunate victim of identity theft.

Can identity theft be prevented?

Can you prevent identity theft? The sad truth is, no — no one can prevent identity theft. That’s because it’s impossible to keep criminals from accessing your personal information and then using it to commit fraud in your name. Even if you do your best to keep your information as secure as possible, some security aspects are out of your control. For instance, if a company with which you do business suffers a data breach, exposing your personal information, how could you have stopped that? The only option is to not have done business with the company in the first place.

Are you an easy target for identity thieves?

If I were an identity thief, would you be an easy target? That depends, in part, on how well you protect your information. It also depends on how well others — to whom you’ve entrusted your information — are protecting it. The one thing you should know is that there’s no way to prevent identity theft, but there are steps you can take to help minimize the risk. Knowing those steps may help you sleep better at night and give you some sense of control over the personal information identity thieves are after. Consider data breaches involving email accounts. If I, as an identity thief, had access to all of the information in your email account, what would I have? Well, possibly everything from old bank and credit card statements to electronic pay stubs to documents you gathered for a mortgage application. Between your inbox and your “sent” mail, there’s no telling what personal information of yours I’d have at my fingertips. And, of course, once I had access to your email account, I’d try to quickly change the password so you couldn’t seize control again.