10 ways to avoid Identity Theft

10 ways to avoid Identity Theft

Identity Theft is a situation where one uses another person’s identity to his advantage for various reasons, most of which are harmful for the person being used. It can be a form of fraud where one pretends to be another person in order to get services, goods, and money among others that were meant for the victim. Some of the main causes of identity theft are: 

• Receiving the attention from the public for the victims’ achievements
• To keep themselves in hiding especially if they are wrong doers.
• Terrorists and illegal immigrants are common identity thieves who travel on stolen identity with fake passports.

Some forms of identity theft may include financial identity theft, criminal identity theft and identity cloning. Avoid identity theft by protecting yourself with identity theft protection from Life Lock and by utililing the following very effective tips: 

1. If you use Internet for transactions, make sure you do not forget to sign out of all your accounts.
2. Place a fraud alert by contacting consumer reporting companies. This will help you in a way that the thief will not be able to open any other accounts in your name.
3. Close all accounts you believe have been tampered with by the fraudsters. Contact and send notices to your credit card companies and banks to let them know about it.
4. Place or file disputes about debts on your existing accounts with the company or file a report with the local police.
5. In case of national security funds, never print your social security number on checks except for rare occasions when it is extremely necessary.
6. Always remember to cancel mail delivery when going on vacation.
7. Make your mailbox less attractive to identity thieves by reducing on the amount of uncalled for offers.
8. Be careful with how you trash your ATM receipts, utility bills, bank statements and other documents as they contain your personal information and may be collected and used by identity thieves.
9. Always use antivirus on your computer and never respond to any emails when you are not sure of the sender, especially if it requires you to fill in personal information. Make sure your company is using an effective cloud computing security system before sharing sensitive data over the network

One funny fact is that even the deceased can be victims of identity theft. For this matter, make sure that you remove your deceased relatives’ name from all joint accounts. Get a number of copies of the death certificate and notify all financial institutions that ever had any business relation with your deceased.