If your credit cards are inexplicably being closed and your cards’ balances are paid in full every month, you should be concerned that you may have become a victim of identity theft. The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection says the first thing you should do is check your credit reports to see whether your good name has been hijacked by an identity thief.
If you discover credit card accounts on your credit reports that you never opened, you’ll need to immediately file a police report and dispute the errors with the credit bureaus. It’s also a good idea to report the crime to the Federal Trade Commission at www.ftc.org.
You should make it a habit to regularly check your credit card accounts. Online security experts say you should log in every couple of days to review transactions.
Don’t ever let your guard down. Here are some identity theft prevention tips from the Better Business Bureau:
- Regularly review your credit reports
- Use online banking to replace paper checks, statements, and bills
- Review statements regularly
- Contact financial providers if you don’t get timely statements
- Sign up for automatic deposit
- Get your mail promptly
- Keep passwords secret and change them frequently
- Wipe sensitive data off a hard drive before discarding an old computer
- Ignore e-mail messages with Internet links and type the full address when visiting a site
- Use e-mail-based account alerts to monitor transfers, payments, low balances and withdrawals.
Keep in mind that it takes on average 80 hours to settle identity theft cases and one-in-four victims are still working on their case more than a year after it was first noticed.
