| How to Behave When You Are a Victim of Identity Theft, Part 3 |
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If your checks are stolen, promptly notify your bank and have the account closed immediately. If your checking account is accessed by checks with forged signatures, you obviously have not authorized the withdrawals and should not be held responsible for money stolen from your account. However, if you neglect to monitor your account and fail to promptly notify your bank when there is an irregularity in your account or your checks are lost or stolen, you may be held partially responsible for your losses. It is not even necessary to have your checks physically stolen for you to become a victim. An identity thief armed with your name, checking account number, and bank routing information can use one of a number of inexpensive computer software programs to create checks for your account. Contact the various check verification companies and ask that they, in turn, contact retailers who use their services telling them not to accept checks from your accounts that have been accessed by identity thieves. Check verification services are companies that maintain databases of bad check writers. Retailers using their services contact the verification service's database before accepting checks. Among the companies that do check verification are CellCharge, CheckCare, and Crosscheck. File a report with the police both where the fraud occurred and where you live. You may find police departments reluctant to accept your report, sometimes for technical legal jurisdictional reasons. Politely insist that they at least accept your report. Remind them that credit bureaus will prevent fraudulent accounts from appearing on your credit report if you can provide a police report. Give the police officer taking the report as much documentation as you have to support your claim, including the ID Theft Affidavit approved by the Federal Trade Commission. When a police report has been filed, send a copy of it to each of the three major credit-reporting agencies. Be proactive. Contact your creditors where you have tainted accounts and get a written statement from each of them indicating that the account accessed by an identity theft has been closed and that the charges made to the accounts are fraudulent. Request that they initiate a fraud investigation. Find out what you are required to do to advance the investigation, such as providing them with a police report. Send copies of your creditors' completed investigations to each of the three credit reporting agencies. Ask them to send you a copy of your updated credit report in order to confirm that any erroneous and fraudulent information has been removed from your file. If fraudulent charges do appear on your credit report, notify the credit reporting bureaus in writing that you dispute the information and request that such information be removed from your file. |
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