Hindsight is always 20/20. If only you knew then what you know now, you likely would have invested in some identity theft protection. At the very least, you might been more careful about allowing access to your personal information. Identity theft can really screw with your life. Some folks have even found that the social implications are worse than the financial ones. Your creditors usually won’t hold you responsible for more than about $50 in damages when you’re an identity theft victim, whereas if a thief uses your identity to commit a crime, that’s likely to haunt you for a very long time. Some people have even found themselves locked up in jail because an identity thief used their name to commit a different crime.
If you’re the victim of identity theft, here are a few things you can do in order to start to clean up the mess:
- Make a police report. File complaints also with your state’s attorney general and the FTC. Gather all of your reports and keep them together in one place.
- Close any accounts that have been compromised. Close the accounts by a phone call immediately, but also send the companies a certified letter. Notify the company in writing that you dispute charges made fraudulently. Keep meticulous records of this correspondence and conversations.
- Contact the credit reporting agencies. You need to ask them to put a fraud alert freeze on your credit reports, which will last for seven years. You also need to start the process of having any false information removed from your credit reports, as well.
- Think about identity theft protection. There are a number of services you can use that will help you handle things if it every happens again. In some cases, they may be able to catch fraudulent activity before it gets out of control, saving you plenty of headache in the future.
- Document everything. The better your records are, the more likely you’ll be able to protect yourself in the future and handle any additional fallout from this point forward.
