Not long ago, I received a letter stating that my personal data, including at least one old address and my social security number, may have been compromised. Needless to say, this was a bit unnerving. While I have no way of knowing whether or not this information was truly stolen, I have to assume that it was. So, what’s a guy to do? [more]

How’s this for conflicting data? Just yesterday I wrote about Bank of America being among the worst “big” banks when it comes to fraudulent incidents per billion dollars on deposit, and yet… [more]

Update: I’ve put together a list of the best high-yield online banks based on reader feedback.

I just ran across an interesting bit of data over on the NY Times Bits weblog. In talking about how well different corners of corporate America do when it comes to protecting customers from identity theft, they put together a rundown of the estimated annual number of “incidents” related to identity theft per billion dollars in deposits for each of the 25 largest banks in the United States. [more]

Awhile back, I noted that we had received a mysterious collections call, and later learned that we had been inadvertently sent to collections by our local Urgent Care facility. Unfortuantely, I had used up my free annual credit reports when I first got the call, so when we later learned what was going on, I wanted to check to see if anything had subsequently shown up on our reports. [more]

In digging for information on how to deal with a wayward debt collector, I ran across a good bit of information on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Here’s a plain English rundown of the protections that the FDCPA affords if a creditor turns your account over to a third party debt collector… [more]

This is certainly good news to anyone out there that is intent on protecting themselves from identity theft and/or credit fraud:

“Major credit bureaus Experian and Equifax on Thursday joined TransUnion and said they will, this year, let people in all 50 states freeze their credit histories…

The decision by all three bureaus to offer national freezes will let consumers lock down their credit histories — especially if they are victims of identity theft. Until now, a patchwork of laws in 39 states allowed consumers, to varying degrees, to protect themselves…

A credit freeze bars the bureaus from issuing your credit history, the summary of loans and payments that forms the basis of your credit score. Because few lenders will issue credit without first seeing a credit score, freezing your information means identity thieves can’t use stolen Social Security numbers to fraudulently open accounts.”

The bad news is that two of the three bureaus (TransUnion and Equifax) will charge $10 a pop to lock and unlock your credit history. They claim that they’re simply trying to cover costs, but Experian has seen fit to offer this service for free. Given that the entire business model of these companies if based on collecting and distributing our personal information, I’m hardly sympathetic to their pleas to “cover their costs” while doing so.

Nonetheless, this is a good option. And if states pass laws mandating lower (or no) fees, the credit bureaus will be forced to comply.

[Source: USA Today]

Since I’ve recently written about dealing with found money, I thought I’d go ahead and share some thoughts about what to do if you find yourself on the other side of the situation, having lost your wallet. [more]

Guess what? Social networking sites increase your risk of identity theft, or so says Neil Munroe of Equifax. According to Munroe:

“The problem is that people don’t realize the significance of the kind of information they are putting out on the Web and who may be accessing it. More and more consumers are signing up to these sites every day and chances are they’ll put on their date of birth, location, e-mail, job and marital status.”

He went on to say that:

“Nearly all of us can search for a name of an old friend and find all their personal details online without them even knowing. Unfortunately, the fact is that not everybody is searching for a friend.”

Equifax is thus advising consumers to limit the amount of information they make available online, especially when it comes to things commonly used for identity verification, such as birth date, mother’s maiden name (who would ever put this online?), names of kids and pets, etc. They are also advising people to make their profiles private, such that only close friends can view the information.

I guess anonymity has it’s privileges, doesn’t it?

[Source: Reuters UK]

I’ve written in the past about how to protect yourself when writing checks (see also “Checkbook Security“), but I haven’t talked much about “check washing.” Check washing refers to the chemical removal of ink from a check that you’ve written such that fraudsters can change the amount and make it payable to themselves. Apparently check washing results in losses totalling $815 million annually in the United States. [more]

I recently received a review copy of a book called “Ultimate Guide to a Better Credit Score.” While I hope to do a full review at some point, I thought I’d go ahead and pull out some useful snippets here and there. First up, let’s tackle the issue of why you should review your credit report. This is actually something that I used to do once per year but, with the availability of free credit reports, I’ve actually started doing it more frequently. Since you get one free report per year from each of the big three credit bureaus, you can now monitor things more regularly by requesting a different report every four months. [more]