| How to Behave When You Are a Victim of Identity Theft |
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Notify the credit reporting agencies and have a fraud alert placed on your account with each agency. Report the crime to the appropriate authorities where you live and where the fraud occurred. Use the FTC's ID Theft Affidavit. Inform all your creditors that you have become a victim of identity theft. Get new credit cards with new account numbers for all tainted accounts. Set up passwords for new accounts. Change your PIN numbers (I know this is redundant because PIN is an acronym for Personal Identification Number, but it just sounds right). When you close tainted accounts, make sure the accounts are reported to the credit reporting agencies as being closed at the customer's request due to identity theft. Ask your creditors to notify each of the credit reporting agencies to remove erroneous and fraudulent information from your file. If your checks are stolen, promptly notify your bank and close the account immediately. Notify the check verification companies and request that they contact retailers that use their services to advise them not to accept checks from any checking accounts of yours that have been accessed by identity thieves. Contact the creditors who have tainted accounts in your name and request that they initiate a fraud investigation. Get a copy of the completed investigation. Send copies of those completed investigations to each of the credit reporting agencies and request that erroneous and fraudulent information be removed from your files. If fraudulent charges do manage to appear on your credit report, notify the credit reporting agencies in writing and tell them that you dispute the information and request that such information be removed from your files. |
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