Identity Theft Articles

Fixing a stolen identity means giving your attention to all the companies where you have credit accounts. Whereas most advice tends to focus on how to interact with credit reporting agencies.

Calling and writing financial institutions is important. You’ll also want to contact service providers such as phone / cell phone providers, utility companies and auto / health / life insurance companies.

If you have a career where you’re a member of a professional organization or agency, then you should contact this organization. And if you have any type of gym, or sports membership, then you may even want to contact these service providers also.

Why all of these organizations?

Identity thieves often use personal information taken from valid associations to open fraudulent accounts elsewhere. For example, if an identity thief is able to obtain information about your accounts with health or life insurance companies then they could change or alter data within these records, and then use the information to obtain new policies with other companies.

If your account(s) with these companies doesn’t yet appear to be affected by fraud, you won’t need to necessarily include everything in your correspondence that would typically be sent to those already affected by the identity theft. However, if fraud issues eventually surface among these companies then any affected accounts will have to be closed, and new ones opened with fraud alerts attached.

When fraud issues appear you always want to request that any information related to the identity theft be sent to you immediately. You can also ask the same information be sent to the police.

And speaking of police, if you contact your local police department you must insist that they file a police report for you. (Filing a police report is important because this report is usually required by credit reporting agencies and creditors alike before they remove instances of fraud from your credit report).

Right now, it’s important to alert service providers and other companies of the fact that you’re a victim of ID fraud. Ask for a “fraud alert” to be placed on accounts you now have. This includes setting up a “username” and “password” whenever possible.

It takes time to repair a stolen identity. An identity stolen today could take many hours to fix in coming months. Failing to go beyond making a few phone calls may keep the affects of ID theft around longer than it should be … leaving opportunities for the fraudster to open new credit lines in your name.