Identity Theft and Credit Protection - some practical tips

This blog is useful in USA only.

I'm looking at some low costs but effective ways of protecting the identity and credit. I know that there are tons of web sites talking about this topic, but here's a brief summary of things that I found efficient solutions that can be used by anybody.

• Documents: Destroy documents that can be digitized and stored in a safe drive (with backups, encryption, etc). Do not make the mistake of destroying papers that will be or could be needed in the future. E.g., many tax related and government papers need to be kept forever or for many years.
  Buy a good paper shredder (cross-cut, etc), that are usually faster and produce little pieces of paper that are almost impossible to take back together. the cheap shredders leave larger pieces. Believe me, it is better to invest a little more in a very good shredder that will last for many years. Of course, it depends of the budget, and it is better a cheaper shredder than nothing.
  Hint: If your employer has hired a confidential document destroyer company, you could dump your personal papers in their bins. My assumption is that if the employer trust in this 3rd party to destroy important confidential data, we could do it too (perhaps the most confidential docs should still be destroyed at home). Usually, I would destroy even every offer letter coming in my mail and having my name or any personal data on it.

• Credit history: I'm working in setting up credit freezes and locks for my family (adults and minors).. I'll describe the process and experience in a future blog. For now, I'll just mention that I found useful to have a combination of Credit Locks and Credit Freezes in the 3 major credit reporting companies (Transunion, Equifax, Experian).

• Identity Theft Insurance: I've never been completely convinced on the benefits of paying for Identity Theft insurance, when we can do very good prevention at a lower cost. The article https://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-identity-theft-insurance-a-waste-of-money-2014-03-31 mentions that lots of victims resolve the problems at low or no cost, so such an insurance would have not been actually needed. Still, I found a couple of ways of getting free identity theft insurance, that I'm going to list next. A low cost option that is available is adding such protection in the homeowner's policy (usually $15 to $50 annually).

  Transunion TrueIdentity (http://trueidentity.com) is the best deal I've found so far. It gives an easy way to lock/unlock the Transunion credit record with an easy to use application and in addition, it gives free Identity Theft insurance for $25000 ! The only drawback I've seen so far, is that by locking the record, we cannot freeze it (I plan to write more about this topic in the future), giving Transunion access to the credit history for advertisement (which they are doing anyway if we don't put a credit freeze). For now, I take this deal to get double protection (lock and insurance) without giving them my currency for it.

  Credit Sesame (https://www.creditsesame.com) looks interesting , offering credit monitoring and identity theft insurance of USD $50000 for free. Of course, nothing is free. As I understand, they monitor the credit history and make offers to users or probably sell the data to financial companies (their privacy policy seems to mention that they would not sell the personal data for other purposes, but it must be read more carefully than I've done so far). At this time, I won't sign up to this service until I learn more about it.

• Credit history monitoring: We can get free credit monitoring from the 3 reporting companies from https://www.annualcreditreport.com . Here, we get the credit report from Experian, Equifax, Transunion, not from a 3rd party that will do it for us, after asking for our social security and other personal data, that is probably somehow sold later (otherwise, the 3rd party couldn't provide their service without a charge!).

  Many Banks, Credit Unions, and Credit Cards provide the credit score access as a free benefit. However, this information is only useful for somebody who is planning to get a loan. Otherwise, not of much use. Just make sure to get the free credit report and verify that all data shown is correct.

• Password manager to store all the passwords. Keepass ( https://keepass.info/ ) is a free open-source utility that runs on Windows, Android, and seems to run on IOS too. This means that the password database can be copied to different devices (the database is strongly encrypted). There are of course tons of such managers. My preference is for the ones that have been used for many years and are open-source.

I'm finishing this post, with a couple of pointers to useful privacy protection info:

• https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/66-ways-to-protect-your-privacy-right-now/
• https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/the-consumer-reports-10-minute-digital-privacy-tuneup/

I don't get paid by any company mentioned in this post. I may be a customer or a user of some of them (in particular if they offer good service at low or no cost :-)