Concerned About Identity Theft? Put Your Credit Report on Ice

November 11th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the United States and Americans now lose over $50 billion a year because of identity theft each year according to the Federal Trade Commission. A number of companies will sell you credit monitoring and credit protection services that claim to help keep you safe from identity theft, but the only way to make sure that you don’t become one of the 9.3 million victims of identity theft each year is to freeze your credit report so that no one my access it, and now the three major credit bureaus are allowing customers to freeze their credit in all fifty states.

Freezing your credit report is the single most effective tool you have available to protect yourself from identity theft. The idea is that you can tell the three major credit bureaus to not give out your credit report information to anyone at all, so no credit inquiries can be done thus making your credit history essentially useless to the identity thief. When you want to apply for a credit card, home loan, or something of that sort you can then go back to the credit bureaus and have them temporarily ‘thaw’ your credit report so that banks can temporarily access them until you tell the credit bureaus that you would like your credit report frozen again.

In some localities, state law makes it so that you can get your credit report frozen for free, but instead of taking the time you research your state law and figure out the exact statute, usually it’s just easier to pay the $10.00 fee to each of the 3 major credit bureaus to freeze each of your credit reports. Each of the three major credit bureaus have a different process to freeze your credit, so you’ll have to check out the credit freeze guides for Equifax, Transunion, and Experian. If you ever want to thaw your credit report so that you can apply for some sort of loan, cell phone contract, or something of the sort, you’ll have to pay another $10.00 fee to each of the three major credit bureaus to make that happen.

The $10.00 fee each of the credit bureaus might seem a little bit much, but when you compare it to the fact that the average victim of identity theft loses $6,000 it’s a very small price to pay.

Don’t sign up with any of the credit monitoring or credit protection services, the only way to stop identity thieves is to freeze your credit.