Identity Theft Made Easy: Why?
December 30, 2022
Some automobiles are lemons aka money holes, because they have defects that keep breaking. Many services are like that as well, including rental car insurance, extended warranties on electronics, and identity theft protection. Life Hacker explains why identity theft protection services are a scam in the story: “Identity Theft Protection Is Mostly Bullshit.”
Most Americans receive emails or physical letters from their place of work, medical offices, insurance agencies, etc. that their personal information was involved in a data breach. As a token of atonement, victims are given free Identity Theft Protection (ITP) aka a useless service. These services promise to monitor the Internet and Dark Web for your personal information. This includes anything from your credit cards to social security number. Identity theft victims deal with ruined credit scores and possibly stolen funds. Identity Theft Protection services seem to be a good idea, until you realize that you can do the monitoring yourself for free.
ITP services monitor credit reports, social media accounts, the Dark Web, and personal financial accounts. Some of these services such as credit reports and your financial accounts will alert you when there is suspicious activity. You can do the following for free:
“You can access your credit reports for free once a year. And you should! It’s a fast and pretty straightforward operation, and at a glance you can see if someone has opened a credit card or taken out a loan in your name. In fact, the number one best way to stop folks from stealing your identity is to freeze your credit, which prevents anyone—even if they have your personal information—from getting a new credit card or loan. While this doesn’t protect you from every single kind of fraud out there, it removes the most common vectors that identity thieves use.”
The US government also maintains a Web site to assist identity theft victims. It is wise to remember that ITP services are different from identity theft insurance. The latter is the same as regular insurance, except it is meant to help when your information is stolen.
Practice good identity hygiene by monitoring your accounts and not posting too much personal information online.
Why is identity theft like a chicken wing left on a picnic table? Careless human or indifferent maintenance worker?
Whitney Grace, December 30, 2022
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
