Identity Theft Prevention: Prevent Thieves from Stealing Your Identity

Will you be the one person out of only 23 that gets there identity stolen this year? Whether it's someone ripping off your credit card and shopping like there's no tomorrow, or someone simply using your social security number and credit history and buying a house, boat, or car, identity theft is rampant and the only one that's able to secure your identity is you.

Yes, it's a pain in the butt, and just one more thing that we have to worry about in life, but the consequences of not using good identity theft prevention are dire.

Imagine this for a minute. What if someone that you've never met before, someone who you never even knew existed were to get arrested, and use your name and identity information to give to the police officer? Do you think that might come back to haunt you somewhere down the road? It certainly would!

One way that many people find out that this has happened to them is when they go after a job, or a loan, and are told that they've been rejected because of their criminal past. This is not a good scenario, but it does happen much more than you might think.

So Identity Theft Prevention is utterly important and you should be doing everything in your power to prevent your identity from being stolen. Everything!

So how do you prepare yourself for preventing such a thing?

Well first of all you must break old and create new habits. For instance you may not think that your activity online is as vulnerable as it is, and so you probably have developed some very bad habits. As an example, do you make purchases online?

If so, do you make sure that your purchase is being made over a secure server? Here's how you do that. Whenever you're making a purchase, simply taking a quick peak at the URL in the browser bar, and make sure that what usually says "http" actually says "https". The ‘s' means that the you're purchasing over a secure server. That's one crucial way that people end up with a stolen identity.

Another is through email. You hear a lot about scams where people are duped into sending tons of money to help people in Nigeria, but that's much different than what I'm talking about. What I'm telling you is when someone sends you a very official looking letter, from either your bank, an online merchant like Paypal, or the granddaddy of all online auction sites Ebay. What do these companies have in common? The fact is that each is either connected to a credit card that you use, or worse your bank account such as in the case of Paypal.

The way it usually works is that somebody will send you an email that looks exactly like a real email that Paypal or your bank might send, and ask you to go and update your account - or even simply click a link to confirm that your account.

Once you click this link, the thief who sent you that email has just obtained your username and password of that account. You're not typing these things into your account, you're typing it in to the thief's database where you're now on queue to be victimized and have your identity stolen. Are you beginning to see why taking identity theft prevention measures is so necessary? I hope so!

Some other things that you should be doing to prevent identity theft are:

• Shredding all your paperwork (even going as far as separating the shredding into separate bags so a persistent thief can't puzzle all the pieces together

• Checking your credit record every 4 months. It's very important to monitor your reports often so that when there is any suspicious behavior or accounts you can jump right on it as quickly as possible. Each of the 3 big credit reporting agencies allows you one free credit report annually, so using this to your advantage you should get a report from each agency once every four months.

• Consider buying identity theft insurance. While it won't fix your credit score, erase a criminal record that's not yours, or even fix your reputation, what it will do is help you pay for all of the stuff that comes with fixing your credit. This includes lawyers fees, fees to credit card companies themselves, as well as paying for your time off work.

The sacredness of our identity is something that we take for granted every single day, until the one day when someone takes it for themselves, leaving you in the dark and up the creek. Don't let this happen to you. Put in place a identity theft prevention plan now!