Personal Finance, practice problem, credit and what to do if identity is stolen, prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance, what to do if identity is stolen with regards to credit, there’s two major categories, I would want to keep in mind, we would be keeping in mind that we want to make sure that no current charges or more charges are being made on our behalf. And that no changes or further changes are happening with regards to our stolen identity.
00:28
The second category being, we want to make sure that we don’t have any long term damage to our credit history, in the event that we then need that credit history for further credit in the future, possibly for the purchase of a home or something like that. So we could contact the three biggest credit bureaus, that’s going to be Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, which we talked about in prior presentations, these are the these are the bureaus that are dependent upon to track credit history.
00:57
And when you look for credit, or you tried to get credit, the institutions will be dependent on them, to determine whether or not your credit history is good, and whether or not, then you’re going to be able to get credit, that’s going to be one of the factors. So therefore, we want to make sure that they have a good solid credit history of us, that’s not going to be tainted by some identity kind of theft problem, that would be there. So we want to contact them and ask the fraud department to institute a fraud alert, request the creditors to call for permission before opening any new accounts in your name.
01:31
Now, as you do this, you might, you know, contact your your credit card companies, your bank, or so on. And ask them, you know, the easiest process possibly to go forward with this with this as well, contact creditors. So we want to, of course, contact the creditors, see if any accounts have been changed or opened fraudulent Lee. So obviously, if any new accounts have open, then, you know, that would be a bad sign or whatnot, we want to take a look at that.
01:56
And we want to make sure that we have the transactions that are being taking place are accurate transactions with regards to the creditors. And again, we might ask them, our financial institutions what what the best actions could be going forward from there as well. We also may want to file a police report, make sure to keep a copy for your records in case you need advance, advance evidence that you took this action in the future.
02:22
So in other words, you file the police report to basically take action, it may not be the case, when you file the police report that you have any real expectation that the police reports going to, you know, apprehend someone and solve and solve the problem that way, even if you had a theft that was taking place. But when you want to, you want to notify the police and you want to have a record that you took action so that if there’s a problem in the future, and you go back and the end, you say hey, look, that wasn’t me, I didn’t make this purchase, there was an identity theft that happened or something like that in the future.
02:54
And the question at that point could be, well, why didn’t you take any action at the time? Why didn’t you do anything at the time, and you want to be able to say I did take action, because it’s quite likely that if something does happen, that you do delay action that’s going to be taken and you might you know, you might not take action till later. But that’s that’s a problem, oftentimes, because again, if you’re trying to prove something in the future, in terms of records to a bureaucracy or something like that, they’re going to be saying, Okay, well, you know, if this problem happened, when when were you notified about it? And then what steps did you take to correct the action.
03:30
And so if you were to contact your credit card company, if you make sure that you document the letter that you gave to the credit card company, and your communications with them, and if you file the police report, not because you actually expect the police to possibly do anything of any great use to you, although it’s good to notify them and they you also at least have a record saying hey, look, I notified that there was this, this that happened at that point, and that again, could help you in the future to just basically prove your case that you know, you saw the problem, you took action on it and and then go forward from there.