Identity Theft Prevention Tips

With more and more things being online these days, you need to take proactive steps to protect yourself from identity theft. It's not like the old days when theft was a home invasion and a good solid deadbolt lock was pretty much sufficient. Even if you are not active on the Internet or if you never buy anything online, that fact in itself does not protect you from the potential of becoming a victim of identity theft.

The most important thing to remember is to protect your personal information. When you do need to give out that information, make sure that you know WHY they need it and what purpose it will be used for. If you are uncomfortable with the answers you get to those questions, you may want to consider changing where you do business, since being a victim of identity theft is not fun and not a place you want to be.

Here are some places you can start with protecting yourself from identity theft. Some may be common sense and some may be things you have not thought of before, but they are all important.

Email Accounts

The convenience of being able to be online whenever you want, doing business, purchasing items, checking your bank balance, paying bills, and so much more, even in your pajamas in the middle of the night cannot be understated. But such convenience comes at a price also and you need to be careful, especially with your email address.

To do business online like paying bills and such, you need to provide the company with your email address. To avoid getting a ton of spam and also not be overloaded with potential "phishing" schemes, the email address you provide to do your online business should NOT be your regular email address. You can get a free email address from various places online, such as Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail. Use this email when you do business online.

Online Identities

It is not a good idea to use your personal identity when setting up your email accounts. This makes it far too easy for identity thieves to identify you specifically. Remember, your email name is used for the purpose of getting email to you, and NOT to identify you specifically. Use the name of your childhood dog combined with the date of your high school graduation ceremony for example, so you might have "sirduke0612" as your email address, something that would be almost impossible for someone to guess. Just be sure that YOU can remember what it is!

Passwords

Having different passwords for all your accounts can be a pain in the rear end but it is a necessity. You should change your passwords at least every 2 to 3 months. Again, like your email username, the password should not be related to your username and should be difficult to guess. The strongest passwords use a combination of letters and numbers, and even use both upper case and lower case letters, since in most systems, they actually differentiate between upper and lower case. For example, if your password was "SeCret", nobody could get into your account by trying the password "secret" or "SECRET" because upper and lower case letters are different.

You may want to combine your password with a number, like the house number of the address where you grew up. It is usually not a good idea to use your birthdate since that is an item that an identity thief could get and guess.