While we're at it...

My last two posts have dealt with internet hacking and brick-and-mortar consumer fraud.  It's a propos to bookend these topics with a discussion of some general steps consumers can take to protect themselves.

The usual disclaimers apply: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.  I'm sharing personal observations only.  Consult an attorney for your specific circumstances.  Also, this information is not complete, from a consumer protection standpoint.  I'm only hitting a few highlights here.

(1) Credit reports.  Every American consumer is entitled to one free credit report per year.  You should avail yourself of this service at a routine minimum, even if you don't think that any aspect of your identity may have been recently compromised.

The easiest way to do this is, assuming you are comfortable doing it over the internet, is via a clearinghouse site recommended by the federal government.  You could instead approach the three credit bureaus individually if you prefer, but I find that they'll distract a person by trying to sell everything under the sun, and for an exorbitant price.  Here is a screengrab of the relevant FTC site:

This is what this site looked like on the morning of this post.  You need to be careful as you're going through this process because there are scam sites on the internet advertising credit report services and they would welcome the input of your personal information.

That link highlighted above, www.annualcreditreport.com, looked like this on the morning of this post:

Remember, whenever you're dealing with any of these sites and personal information is involved, you need to always see the secure HTML symbol in the site address:

It is a fairly efficient and user-friendly process to walk through the AnnualCreditReport site.  It directs you to each of the three credit bureaus sequentially and then there's a "back"-style button so that you can proceed to the next after you've dealt with the others.  The only lack-of-smoothness might potentially arise when you go to save your credit reports.  Experian printed easily to PDF for me yesterday, but I found I had to copy-n-paste the other two into a word processing program and save them as editable files.  There may have been another way to do it, depending on the browser used, but I took the path of least resistance.

Of course if you see activity on your reports for which you were not responsible, you need to start the process of resolution, which is a topic too intricate for me to go into here.

(2) Junk mail.  Junk mail can pose a risk to your identity simply by overwhelming your ability to monitor what's actually going on with your name and address.  I can't tell you how many times I have tossed out unopened mail that appeared to be junk and which had near-miss variants of my name on it.  At the time, I assumed that some minimum-wage person whose native language was not English simply transcribed my name incorrectly on yet another of an infinite number of mass-mailing lists.  It never occurred to me until yesterday that someone with a similar name or pseudonym might actually be up to something fraudulent and the results of their activities were starting to roll down-hill and into my mailbox.

I'm not sure what to suggest here.  Once several years ago, I took considerable effort to go through the recommended official channels to get off mailing lists and cut down the junk mail, and what happened?  Seriously, the amount of junk mail I received practically doubled as an apparent result of my efforts to stop it.  By this time, because my husband and I moved to Centerpointe from separate houses (and thus we were severally receiving huge amounts such that we are now receiving 2x a huge amount), I literally need to bring a carrying container with me when I go to our mailbox.  It's sometimes five pounds a week of junk that we're receiving!

Once again, there is a federal government site that deals with some of this issue:

The two sites it recommends are Opt Out Prescreen for cessation of credit offers (highlighted in the screengrab above), and DMA's Mail Preference Service for other unsolicited mail (if that link doesn't work, search "DMA choice" and go to the direct marketer's site).  There are also commercial services offering to stop your junk mail and personally I'd be willing to pay for them if someone could convince me they'd actually work.  I'm going to try both of these FTC-recommended options now as a first measure, and I'll report in a subsequent post whether I've noticed any positive results.

Anyway, there's a few ideas as openers for you.  Good luck with it.