Here we go again.
“Fidelity breach exposed personal data of 77,000 customers”
If you have your nest egg in accounts at Fidelity, that probably made your stomach lurch. The fact that those 77,000 people were only 0.2% of Fidelity’s 51 million customers is small comfort if you were one of the 77,000.
That was last week’s announcement, this week it will be something else equally close to home – how about Apple, Meta, Twitter, Disney, AT&T, Truist Bank, Ticketmaster, JP Morgan Chase, Roku … all of which announced data breaches this year, along with scores of lesser known companies.
Aside from panicking, what can you do about this inevitable risk?
The hackers are only getting better and faster at scamming and hacking, so yes, it is inevitable. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report for 2021 (latest available) said 23.9 million people had been victims of identity theft during the prior 12 months; 59% of those had financial losses totalling $16.4 BILLION.
There is one simple step you can take, that while not foolproof for every conceivable cybercrime, is at least a solid bulwark against identity theft. Get a Credit Freeze. Not a Credit Lock (Experian’s paid service), not LifeLock (flogged on national TV), not any other paid service – save your money.
A credit freeze is something you put on your credit file at each of the three national credit bureaus – Experian, Equifax and TransUnion – so that your credit file cannot be accessed by someone trying to open a new credit card, cell phone, or car loan account in your name. You must set it up at each bureau, and it remains in place until you ‘unlock’ it. If you should need to pull your credit report, you must unlock it yourself either for a specific time period, such as the week when you are car and loan shopping, or indefinitely (bad idea). You unlock the freeze by calling or going to the credit bureau website, entering the date range for when you want your file open, and a PIN you received when you set up the freeze. It takes a minute or two and is generally almost instantly active, if you happen to be an impulse shopper.
The downside to having a freeze on your credit files? If you are the person who walks into a department store and the clerk says “you can save 15% today if you open a new XYZ charge card” – that won’t work, as they pull an automated instant credit report which will bounce, unless your file is already unlocked. Ditto for online offers for credit card applications or any other ‘instant’ credit offer. So, the impulse shopper will be foiled.
However, the workaround is to unlock your credit freeze, then shop.
This is really the one and only step you can take to safeguard against credit fraud and identity theft, so as the saying goes, ‘Just Do It”.
Got to each credit bureau website: Experian.com, Equifax.com, Transunion.com. Search for Credit Freeze (they do not make it easy or obvious as each bureau offers its own paying service, and they have similar names. You only want “Credit Freeze” (TransUnion) or “Security Freeze” (Equifax, Experian). It is free, and won’t affect your credit score.
The next time the news blares about another hacking job of XYZ national company, you can remain calm. Cost – zero. Peace of mind – priceless.
