Ways to Gain Protection Against Identity Theft On A Tight Budget

Several years ago, the identity of my brother was stolen. In less than five days, his bank account was hit with four $300 charges and the bank didn’t help much beyond cancelling those items from his balance. This go around wasn’t too bad, as the bank did side with him eventually, canned those fraudulent charges and gave him new account numbers.

The scary thing is that, even months later, there was still someone out there claiming to be my brother, and they even had his financial and personal information — enough to get into serious trouble.

My brother reached out and handled his problems himself, despite the fact that his credit still gets hammered by fake charges once in a while. No question, my brother was lucky.

Losing your identity is one of the scariest things about being an interconnected, Internet based society. It’s awful to lose piles of money and end up spending hours of frustrating phone calls trying to halt payment on inane purchases you never even bought. Businesses have stepped up to help protect the frightened people, and they are taking advantage of the fear to score serious cash. For a fee, you too can join in on the madness.

No Tracking

Protection against identity theft is not customer friendly; there is no possible way for customers to see how effective these service providers really are, or if they are improving computer security at all.

Most companies center their efforts around checking your credit score regularly so no charges can slip past you without you being aware of its presence. There’s nothing complicated about reading your credit report — you could do it too, for much cheaper, I might add. So, not counting this, what exactly do these businesses do?

This is an impossible question, and one that plagues every customer who is blindly shoveling money away in the hope that somehow this will keep the identity theft demons away. With no way to track their activities, you have to accept their claims and assume you are safer by some means. Since protection against identity theft can solely be measured by whether or not an identity has been stolen, if your identity hasn’t been stolen, your service provider must have helped, yeah?

Well, not really. You’ll never really know.

Featureless Services

The price of protection against identity theft can vary greatly with the number of features each program claims to offer. Not one company out there right now discloses exactly what features and services they provide in an explicit manner, which ones are premium and what comes in the package. Almost everything these companies will do for you, you can do for yourself.

Identity theft is certainly scary, and protection is important, but doing racking up bills through a third party company doesn’t equate to safety and security.

Make your info safe, use identity theft prevention techniques to stay safe even when reviewing financials online. Do some research and get as much info as you can about which services one can purchase and how you can have protection against identity theft. Only take serious advice from trusted sites and avoid scams and fraudulent claims.

categories: identity theft,fraud prevention,online education,privacy,fraud,security,internet,reference and education,news and society,legal,computers,self improvement