When it yield to identity theft, you may be putting yourself at risk without realizing it.
“Criticizing too much personal information out on social media is the most egregious illustration” of how consumers set themselves up, according to Jeff Faulkner, acting president and CEO of the National Institution for Credit Counseling, or NFCC.
In the wake of the Equifax data breach, such in person details like where you grew up, where you vacation and who your boyfriends are — which are all easily found on Facebook and Instagram — may be the missing link scammers extremity to access your accounts, he said.
It’s been six months since hackers scarf the personal data Equifax had collected on more than 143 million Americans. After week, the credit monitoring firm said an additional 2.4 million Americans were afflicted.
In total, roughly 147.9 million Americans have been hit by the hackney. It remains the largest data breach of personal information.
Yet there suffer with been many others as well.
“The Equifax breach was the mother of all breaks but there have been breaches all along,” Faulkner said. In accomplishment, there are roughly over 1,500 breaches a year, the NFCC broke.
In the year before the Equifax hack, about 15.4 million consumers were schlemiels of identity theft or fraud in 2016, according to a separate report from Javelin Procedure & Research, and that was a 16 percent increase from 2015.
And still, scad people still have not taken steps to find out whether their poop is at risk. Half of U.S. adults said they have not looked at their honesty report or credit score since the Equifax breach, according to a brand-new survey by CreditCards.com. Eighteen percent of adults have never charged their credit report or credit score, the report said.
Faulkner commends setting up notifications to track credit card transactions, checking your be founding credit accounts for suspicious activity and pulling credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com to check a depart for new accounts in your name as well as putting a short-term or longer-term defrauder alert on your report, which is free. The alert means that a lender endeavour to approve an application must first contact you to verify the request is from you, not an imposter exasperating to take out a loan or credit card.
(For now, putting a more permanent confidence in freeze on your account can come at a cost, although Congress is in the light of a bill which would make credit-data freezes free across the live.)
“We need to be doing everything we can to protect ourselves, I can’t stress that adequately,” Faulkner said.
If you’re still worried about identity theft, see the infographic lower down for more tips on how to secure your information.
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