Any doubts regarding identity theft must be taken seriously as many people have faced monetary losses during the last few years owing to this menace. Moreover, Identity theft might bring a serious impact on reputation and adversely affect your employment, health, finances and more.
If your name, address, credit card number, social security number or bank account details have been used for illegitimate purposes, you might be a victim of identity theft. Let’s quickly go through about what has to be done now.
1. Consider Freezing the Financial Account
Any transaction from your bank account which has not been authorized by you is a situation of identity theft. It is best if you call your bank, freeze the account and clear all the money before situation turns upside down.
Also, go through past bank records and watch out for any suspicious activity. This might send you a hint about any unnecessary charges from where the information has been retrieved.
2. Report Federal Trade Commission & Local Police
Open the website identitytheft.gov and report to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). FTC will learn your situation, plan a recovery strategy and provide other necessary services, documents to help you pass through the situation.
Post-FTC, you shall log in your complaint at the police department. In case the crime has occurred at some other destination, file the complaint through phone.
3. Call A Credit Reporting Agency
Once you have skimmed through all the credit information and found out mysterious changes, call any credit reporting agency like Experian, Equifax or Transunion. They will help you in placing a fraud alert on the credit report. This step will let the other credit companies know that you have become a victim of identity theft. Following actions will be taken cautiously by any other credit company as well.
4. Open A New Account
Though the process might seem a little longer at one end, it is required to make a new account and transfer your funds into it. If you think that after taking above steps solves all the problems, there might be a difference. Any future chance of getting attacked through the same account can be sorted by opening another account.
5. Take Secure Steps in Future
From basic steps like keeping strong passwords, checking the credit report with time, take help from Identity Theft Monitoring Services and keeping a distance from malicious sites, another fruitful step can be taken.
This step is keeping Advanced Identity Protector in your PC, well in advance.
What Is Advanced Identity Protector?
This tool by Systweak is efficient in providing identity theft protection to its end-users. How? Advanced Identity Protector hides your private identity traces from the web world. Once you click ‘Start Scan Now’, the software finds the traces and asks you the next course of action.
Here, you can choose to delete them or save them securely in an in-built vault. This vault remains protected by a password which is known only to you. The information in the vault gets encrypted and provides a major push to identity theft protection.
Interestingly, you can go through its Settings in detail where Scheduling, General settings, Scan logs, and other features could be noticed.
Now you can safely protect your various information and stay away from any kind of data stealing.
Conclusion
We understand it is not pleasing to lose your information or money. Yet all such cases due to identity theft can be avoided using proper tools that will deviate the path of a cybercriminal or hacker and let him stay away from you. Advanced Identity Proper must be downloaded and kept in your PC for a safe side.
