Someone stole my brother’s identity ten years ago. In a week, he was hit with four $300 charges, and the bank wasn’t too happy with him. After a few days they finally sided with him and cancelled those charges from ravaging his credit and gave him new bank account information.

The really scary thing about this whole experience is that someone out there in the real world was walking around, claiming to be my brother, and because he or she had just enough personal and financial information to get by, no one could prove this stranger to be otherwise.

My brother reached out and handled his problems himself, despite the fact that his credit still gets hammered by fake charges once in a while. No question, my brother was lucky.

Identity theft is the scariest Internet crime. It costs millions of dollars to millions of people worldwide every year and soaks up hours upon hours of frustrating phone calls to halt payment on fraudulent purchases. In the past few years, several businesses have sprung up to help protect consumers all over the world, taking advantage of fear to scrape together a load of cash. You can even join in for a monthly fee.

No Ability To Track Effectiveness

Businesses offering protection against identity theft do not allow consumers to look at how effective their services are or whether they even help in the slightest.

One of their main claims to fame is this: these services frequent your credit report and take notice if any charges begin to accumulate for large sums. This way, nothing goes through without you knowing about it. You could do this for yourself — for free. So, excluding this, what do these businesses do?

That question is impossible to answer, which is the most frustrating thing about these protective services. You have to take their word for it and assume you are somehow safer. Obviously, this can cause friction between the customer and the business. Protection against identity theft can only be measured by whether or not your identity has been stolen since beginning the use of their product. If your identity isn’t stolen, that means their efforts helped, right?

Well, not really. You’ll never really know.

What Features?

Pricing for protective services changes heartily from service to service depending on what they claim to do for you. There is no business out in Internet Land who explicitly states what they do and for how much and which ones are premium and which are not. Just about everything — yes, everything — these companies do for you, you can easily do on your own. For free.

Protection against identity theft is crucial to maintaining your financial security, but throwing money at strangers to read your credit report just doesn’t make sense in the long run.

Don’t wait any longer, use identity theft prevention techniques to have security even when reviewing financials online. Do some research and get as much info as you can about which services one can purchase and how you can have protection against identity theft. Only take serious advice from trusted websites to avoid scams and fraudulent claims.

categories: identity theft,fraud prevention,online education,privacy,fraud,security,internet,reference and education,news and society,legal,computers,self improvement

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Filed under: Law

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