TAKING ACTION
Armed with an understanding of your own particular problem areas, you are now ready to take action. This page tells you how to prepare for identity theft and how to lower your risk of it happening in the first place. It also contains information on what to do should your wallet get stolen, or if you discover that the worst has already happened.
Build on Dennis Emergency Kit
The best way to prepare for the fallout from identity theft is to assemble an identity emergency kit. This kit contains all the items that you will need if your wallet or purse is lost or stolen or if you eager find that your identity has been damaged. Of course, you'll want to keep your identity kit in a secure place. You might even consider keeping it in a safety deposit box at your bank. It not only keeps your information safe from theft, but if your house is ever destroyed or damaged by are or flood, you'll have a head start on picking up the pieces.
Document Yourself
To begin, pull together copies of all the important documents in your life that identify you. For documents that you don't carry around on a regular basis like your passport, birth certificates, or marriage licenses, simply putting them in the kit is enough. For documents that you use regularly', like a driver's license or your bank or credit card, you need to make a photocopy of the front and back of each one. The easiest way to make this happen is simply to copy the entire contents of your wallet. Store the photocopies in your kit.
You also want to photocopy or include sample bills or statements for your bank accounts and credit cards. Since most companies will want to verify your knowledge of account activity prior to onto problem you report, having these bills handy will save a lot of time and explanation.
You may also want to download and print the Identity Theft affidavit available from the FTC Web sites (http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/). This affidavit can be used to supply information to the various agencies that will want to know about your case.
Your Password Plan
The second part of your first aid kit is a policy and password plan. Start by gathering together all the policy documents and statements from your credit cards, loans, and banks. Read through them to understand where companies will assume liability and where they will try to push it off onto you. If you are in the middle of a problem, having these documents in one place will make it much easier for you to figure out who to contact first and what you need to tell them.
After you get the liability issues sorted out, you need to organize your passwords. If you're like the average person, you have made up anywhere from ten to thirty passwords. And you probably can barely remember what all of them are for. Most people have sorts of passwords…important ones that they try to make somewhat difficult to figure out, and unimportant ones that are often their name.
Don't be tempted to enter your passwords into a spreadsheet, word processor, or other program on your computer. The beauty of an old-fashioned paper notebook is that no one can hack into it. When you upgrade to a new computer, you haven t given the full list to the next person to boot your old hard drive. It's not in your PDA when that gets lost or stolen. And if you ever get into trouble an a loved one needs to help you out, the technology involved in opening a notebook is something that just about anyone can handle.
Of course, this notebook, too, must be kept locked in a secure place. Many security experts would argue with me about the wisdom of writing down your passwords at all. But most security experts don't seem to have trouble remembering thirty passwords.
Good for them. For the rest of us, this notebook will be incredibly useful if you find that someone is taking over your accounts. You can quickly identify all the passwords you care about and change them. It's a protective action that can give you great peace of mind. Otherwise, when bad things happen, you can be left with the nagging feeling that you've left some window of opportunity standing wide open for the bad guys. Note that if you have special family issues to be wary of, you don't want to publicize the existence of your notebook.
For the first month or so, when you stumble across another Web site or account that you made up a password for, write that in your notebook. After you've gotten a pretty reliable list, store the notebook with your identity first aid kit.
Next, every six months, open your notebook and look at your passwords. Are there any accounts that you haven't used and you can close? Having open, unused accounts is something of an invitation for a thief.
