AAA Hawaii’s Annual Holiday Season Travel and Shopping Poll of 250 local residents reveals that 76% plan to primarily shop this holiday with credit or debit cards. However, almost four in ten of surveyed shoppers have little or no concern about identity fraud happening to them this holiday shopping season! Identity theft is rampant throughout the holiday season. Over the past 3 years stolen data being used in less than one week jumped from 33% to 71%, meaning that they steal today and shop today. Identity thieves count on our lackadaisical attitude toward monitoring our wealth.
Not only does legitimate business pick up during the holiday season, but Identity theft and fraudulent Business seems to be on the rise as well. Especially during these hard economic times Identity thieves are on the prowl more than ever looking for a quick fix to their financial problems. It is just not possible to observe and ward off every threat to our identity. There will be documents that you forget to destroy or lock up, accounts that you won’t cancel, checks that you will mail, and waiters that will disappear with your credit card. It is not practical to think that we can cover every situation that threatens the safety of our identity. But we are not helpless in these situations.
Like an experienced spy, we have a solid backup plan. It is extremely important to monitor the key components of our identity especially during the Holidays. Over 50% of all Identity theft is self detected. Here are a few tips to stay safe and keep an eye out for Identity Fraud this Holiday Season:
Monitor Your Credit Report Look for any suspicious activity or unknown accounts. If you find anything new that you haven’t applied for contact the responsible financial institution immediately.
Credit Monitoring Services Services that companies offer make it easy to ensure that fraudsters aren’t accessing your personal information, accounts, or credit. Allowing them to do it for you will put you more at ease this Holiday Season.
Sign up for Account Alerts This way you will know immediately if anyone is making fraudulent charges on your account.
Switch to Online Statements This way you can more easily access your accounts throughout the month rather than waiting until the end of the month for a statement.
About the author: John Sileo speaks professionally to organizations that wish to avoid the costs associated with identity theft, data breach, social media exposure and insider theft. His satisfied clients include the Department of Defense, Blue Cross Blue Shield, the FDIC, Pfizer and hundreds of corporations of all sizes. Learn more about his entertaining and effective presentations at www.ThinkLikeaSpy.com or contact him directly on 800.258.8076.
It's not only shopping with credit or debit cards that we should be careful about. We also need to be extra careful about debt relief and debt consolidation reduction loans companies which have been flooding Television sets and e-mail in-boxes with ads for a while. I read this here: <a title="Debt settlement businesses currently susceptible to harder regulation" href="http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2010/11/23/debt-relief-regulation/">Debt relief companies now subject to tougher regulations In order to crack down on fraudulent practices, the government has enacted stiffer rules on debt consolidation reduction companies. To keep from throwing instant cash away, consumers should always take a look at a debt consolidation reduction business soliciting their business.
My advices:
- Do not use any untrusted computers. By example: computers used by young-teenagers that are not under any parental-surveillance. They can easily tend to surf on illicites-sites where are found a big bunch of security-threats.
- Do not use public computers (ex: in cafes), with your sensitive personal data; Your bank accounts, your favorites stores accounts, your personal email accounts, social networking accounts.
- You need to shop online? Select one computer as trusted and private for your shopping. Be honest, maybe your own computer is not the trusted one.
- Avoid to log too much to your accounts. More you connect to your accounts, more your infos are in circulation, more chance they can be intercepted. Just be a bit more restricted during holiday season.
- Shop as much as you want but log to your account only when you are ready to buy.
- The encryption SSL2 should NOT be used by any web browsers.
- If you have the chance to reinstall all your system, it is the time to do it. The system should be fully patched and updated. Use the latest versions of your security programs (anti-virus and firewall). Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 or Kaspersky Pure are solid security products that you can trust on.
- Just look how you use your own house keys… just relax and be firm on how, when, where you can allow the flow of your sensitive infos.
Another good trick, to help you to be secure online:
- Use a LiveCD, also called a bootable CD. You can download a fully functional Operative System like Linux and burn it to a CD.
The one that I am using right now to write this comment is Ubuntu 9.10.
You can freely download Ubuntu 10.10 at:
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
If you are not comfortable with all these manupulations, ask the help of a close friend. Once you have the CD burned, you are ready to go.
Insert the CD in your computer and boot your computer. Try the CD WITHOUT installing the new system. The system will then copy itself into memory, NOT into your hard drive. So NOTHING at all will be deleted or changed in your system.
Once the system loaded and ready, you can use Firefox to browse the web.
The advantage here is that you are using a system that is perfectly clean, each time you boot from it. This is very important for your security; there are no bad programs in the system to steal your accounts info, by example. Linux is a system build with a high level of security in mind.