How to Protect Yourself From Identity Theft

Video Transcript

"How to protect yourself against identity theft. Well what is identity theft? That's when somebody gets a hold of your social security number and your credit information and pretends that they're you and they start going out and inflicting financial damage on you by using your information to obtain financing, open new charge cards, use charge cards. Another type of identity theft is when someone steals your wallet or your purse and starts using the credit cards that you have in there. That's an obvious occurrence. The less obvious occurrence is when they steal your identity and you don't know it's been stolen for some months. There are a number of different services that are available right now that can alert you to that and at the same time indemnify you for restoring your credit. You have got Life Lock, you've got Identity Card, so on and so forth, Life Link and many different services that you can enlist the, pay them $9.95 or $12.95 and they'd be happy to take and monitor your credit and also indemnify you. You could even go to for example Allstate and I'm sure State Farm offers $25 a year, $25,000 of identity theft "reimbursement or indemnification" so that if that does happen to you then that pays for you to hire an attorney or whatever you need to do to fix it. Now the great thing about some of these services like Identity Guard is that they have an inhouse service that will help you repair your situation. They also send you a copy of your credit scores and you need to monitor your credit scores. We live in that age and it is not going to get better later. Nine million people are going to have their identity stolen in this country this year. That is a major problem. If nine million people lost their homes we'd have a real crisis, well losing your identity or having your identity stolen is just as serious in some respects if you don't keep tabs on it so I would recommend it for everybody."