Elena Had A Close Call With Respect To Identity Theft

      Let us talk about identity fraud today. Almost everywhere you live in the world, credit reporting agencies are a part of your life. They affect you with respect to the following:

Credit Cards

Apartment rentals

Buying a house

Buying insurance

Getting a job

Getting a professional license or government security clearance.

Medical care that you receive.

Your ability to find a partner in life. (Some dating websites check your credit score before accepting you.)

        Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, etc get constant complaints about the power that they exert over our lives. Not as much attention is given to the great power that credit reporting agencies have over lives.

    If someone does a hack or gets your personal information on "The Dark Web," it could have disastrous consequences for you. It could cause you huge financial losses. It could take many years to correct.

     A part of each of your lives should be two things as follows:

1) An effective monitoring system of your credit file that reports all new inquiries, account openings, public records, etc.

2) An effective identity fraud insurance police that comes to your aid with legal assistance, reimbursement for losses, etc. Often your homeowner's insurance will have such a feature. State Farm Insurance provides us with this coverage. Please avoid companies like Lifelock that have huge advertising budgets and a horrible payment record.

    Saturday morning, I was reviewing Identity Guard with respect to Elena's credit file. This service costs us $19.00 US per month. There is a section covering the activity of The Dark Web. (Most of us use 20% of the internet. The rest of the internet is sort of "unexplored territory.")

     I found a most troubling alert. It was a public record where an unknown woman got her name tied to Elena's Social Security number. It set off all sorts of warning "bells and whistles."

    Elena and I used this credit monitoring service to review all three US credit reporting agencies. We got the following results:

-No inquiries were discovered that we had not initiated.

-No new accounts had been opened.

-No strange public records or derogatory information was detected.

-We saw no suspicious activities with respect to the house title.

    We did a careful review of credit cards. We found no suspicious activity. We did a review of bank accounts. We saw no suspicious activity. We did a review of investment accounts. We saw no suspicious activities.

       We informed several interested parties of this suspicious activity. This afternoon, we will be on the phone with all three major US credit reporting agencies.