Someone stole my brother’s identity ten years ago. In a week, he was hit with four $300 charges, and the bank wasn’t too happy with him. After a few days they finally sided with him and cancelled those charges from ravaging his credit and gave him new bank account information.
The horrifying thing about the whole experience was just knowing that there was someone out there claiming to be my brother, armed with just enough personal and financial data to get into big trouble.
Thankfully, my brother was able to get beyond those problems, even though his credit still gets bothered by fraudulent charges every now and then. Luck was with him.
Losing your identity is one of the scariest things about being an interconnected, Internet based society. It’s awful to lose piles of money and end up spending hours of frustrating phone calls trying to halt payment on inane purchases you never even bought. Businesses have stepped up to help protect the frightened people, and they are taking advantage of the fear to score serious cash. For a fee, you too can join in on the madness.
No Ability To Track Effectiveness
The first issue customers have with Internet protection services is that there is no way to keep an eye on how effective they really are, or if they’re even increasing security at all.
Most companies center their efforts around checking your credit score regularly so no charges can slip past you without you being aware of its presence. There’s nothing complicated about reading your credit report — you could do it too, for much cheaper, I might add. So, not counting this, what exactly do these businesses do?
This is an impossible question, and one that plagues every customer who is blindly shoveling money away in the hope that somehow this will keep the identity theft demons away. With no way to track their activities, you have to accept their claims and assume you are safer by some means. Since protection against identity theft can solely be measured by whether or not an identity has been stolen, if your identity hasn’t been stolen, your service provider must have helped, yeah?
No. There are no guarantees.
What Features?
Pricing for protective services changes heartily from service to service depending on what they claim to do for you. There is no business out in Internet Land who explicitly states what they do and for how much and which ones are premium and which are not. Just about everything — yes, everything — these companies do for you, you can easily do on your own. For free.
Protection against identity theft is crucial to maintaining your financial security, but throwing money at strangers to read your credit report just doesn’t make sense in the long run.
One of the fastest growing concerns in our security is preventing identity fraud, so take serious measures to be safe. Try researching ways to stay safe online, even when accessing sensitive information, and check to see if there are trustworthy advise you can obtain. Look to trusted websites to give you real answers to your protection against identity theft questions.
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Fri, Dec 4, 2009
PC Security