Jun 25 2008
Educate Yourself on How to Protect Your Credit
After experiencing identity theft one of the ways to help prevent fraudulent accounts from continuing to open is to have a fraud alert on your credit report. Understanding what the fraud alerts are for and what freezing your credit can do will only help preventing further problems with others stealing your identity.
There are two kinds of fraud alerts, initial and extended. An initial fraud alert will remain on your credit report up to 90 days. Creditors must use a procedure that is stated by law that requests personal information to identify if it is really you that is requesting information about your account or trying to open a new account. An extended fraud alert stays on your credit report for seven years. This can happen if you reported identity theft to the police. You would have to mail in a copy of the report to the credit reporting companies (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) in order for it to be extended. When trying to open a new account the creditors will have to either meet with you personally or contact you rather than an online or mail service. The credit reporters will also remove your name from a listing for pre-screened credit offers.
Depending on which state you live in will depend on whether or not you can freeze your credit. Some states will not allow you to freeze your credit unless you have proof of identity theft happening to you. If the state allows a person to do a credit freeze without proof of identity theft then chances are they will also charge a small fee. Once you request a credit freeze then this will limit access to your credit report from being viewed by potential creditors. You can still have access to your credit report and score, but it just won’t allow any potential or current creditors or third parties to view it. If you want to apply for new credit the only way you can do this is if you lift the freeze temporarily by using a PIN number. In order to lift the freeze you may also need to pay a fee and it will take about three days before it is lifted. You must also realize that if you decide to do a credit freeze then you must contact all of the major credit bureaus and if you decide to lift it you will have to do it with each of the three bureaus as well.
Even though using a credit freeze may help in most cases of protecting yourself from further identity theft it cannot help in some areas. For instance, if you didn’t have new accounts opened and someone has been using your credit cards then the credit freeze will not help. Also, new accounts can be opened such as bank accounts that don’t require a credit check. Despite this fact a credit freeze will help protect you from most credit thieves.
