Are You A Possible Identity Theft Victim?

Is your identity save or is someone on a beach spending your money? You need to protect yourself.

I never gave much thought to someone stealing my identity. I thought I was too "average" for someone to want it in the first place. I am a simple person without much to steal,no great wealth that someone would find attractive but a while back someone used one of my credit cards to buy a bunch of "stuff" on line. The credit card company became curious and called me asking if I had used the card to purchase a large amount of electronics from a big store out of state. I told them neither I or my card had been out of state so I did not know how the card could have been used. They canceled the card and then a long painful journey began to get over $7000 recovered and a thief arrested.

The situation became even more interesting when I told the police and the credit card company that the card had never left my house not only that but it was a brand new card and I had never activated it. A real mystery considering no one else had touched the card,it had never left the house and it had not been activated. So how did someone get the number and use it?

The answer came several months later and after much worry and concern on my part. Someone at the bank or company that issues the cards was stealing the numbers before they were even mailed. I do not know if the person was arrested or not because the banks do not want the public to know about problems like that but the point is Identity Theft is a very sneaky crime and unfortunately one that is not high on the priority list of the banks or the police. I was told at one point that unless there was more to the crime than my little amount the credit card company would simply charge it off and never even look for the criminal. Of course, that means that the cost of charging it off is passed on to me and you in higher rates and fees.

Our local news channel presented a story about identity theft recently that is a good example of the intelligence need to be an identity theft criminal. It seems that one of the local storage facilities auctioned off the contents of pass due rental units and the person that bought the contents of a particular storage unit became suspicious when he open the contents to find piles of fake and real documents, hospital records, counterfeiting equipment, and drugs and drug paraphernalia. One of the crooks worked at a local hospital and copied the information from patient hospital forms. The rest of the info was taken from someones house and stashed in storage locker. I guess they didn't need to use this patch of stolen identities as yet. There is a massive market for this information and many people interested in buying it.

The moral to all this is that you must do everything you can to reduce the odds of your personal information being stolen. I now check my credit card balance and bank balance weekly, looking for items I do not recognize. I shred everything that contains anything that could lead to my personal information. Become the invisible person and the crooks looking for an easy identity to steal will look else where. It cost me a lot to learn a lesson and I hope my story will help you from experiencing identity theft.


------

How to prevent Identity Theft is a topic dear to Jerry Hubbards heart. He is a surviving Identity Theft Victim and tells about it at http://www.djhottopics.com