Identity theft happens frequently. Americans have lost more than $3.3 Billion to fraudulent activities during 2020, much of it due to identity theft.
Identity theft is an extremely upsetting experience and can harm your financial situation for years. Since we’ve started working from home en masse, we’ve had to juggle work and private lives, often from the same computer. The information overflow goes in both directions, making it even easier for bad actors to access your sensitive information.
Why do I need Identity theft protection?
Identity thieves steal your personal information to impersonate you and commit credit card fraud, mortgage, and utility scams, commit health insurance fraud and drain your bank accounts. Increasingly, vengeful or opportunistic cybertrash even steals entire digital or social media profiles to catfish lonely singles.
We’ve entered an age of taking extra care to protect our digital selves. Thankfully there are several identity theft protection services out there to help you. These services will monitor your online presence and media profiles and inform you of unusual activity so that you can take action before you become a victim of identity theft.
Where do identity thieves get my information?
Data breaches happen all the time. You usually don’t know about it until it’s too late. Hackers target big companies in the healthcare, retail, and financial industries, as they retain extensive client information databases. Successful hackers get thousands or millions of profiles in one go.
But wait; there is more! These days the internet is crammed with people-search sites that list millions of people’s personal information publicly. Thanks to them, anyone can look up your name to find your Social Security number, home address, and a lot more – no hacking skills required. Just a few clicks will reward them with everything they need to steal your identity and use it for malicious deeds.
Checkout Database Security Best Practices
The Warning Signs of Identity Theft
If you keep a sharp lookout you may be lucky enough to spot some of the indicators listed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC):
- When you notice withdrawals from your account that you didn’t make.
- When you stop receiving bills because the thieves changed your billing address to hide their crimes.
- When you start getting calls from debt collectors about accounts that you didn’t create or have never used.
- When you receive tax documents addressed to you, but you can’t make sense of it.
- When you notice changes to your credit score.
Identity theft is a lot more common than people think, and it could be worth buying yourself some peace of mind.
What is IDShield?
The founder of the law firm LegalShield, Harland Stonecipher, was involved in a serious car crash in 1969 and almost went bankrupt because of the high cost of legal fees. He set out to build LegalShield, a company aimed at making legal representation accessible and affordable to everyone.
Due to the rising number of legal issues arising from data theft incidents, LegalShield developed an insurance package with a full complement of services to deal with identity theft restoration. According to ID Shield reviews It uses custom-built, cutting-edge technology to deliver one of the most comprehensive identity monitoring and restoration services available today.
What services does IDShield offer?
IDShield can protect your savings, credit score, and reputation via three categories of services: financial monitoring and protection, privacy and reputation management, and unlimited specialist restoration and support services.
Financial monitoring and protection
This service prevents identity theft by monitoring the dark web and credit bureaus to spot changes related to the 12 known key indicators of identity theft.
Privacy and reputation management
Reputation management involves more than passive monitoring. IDShield can scan social media sites where they will, of course, look for identity theft, but will also look for things that can hurt your professional reputation such as foul language or references to drugs.
IDShield offers you peace of mind with a complete dashboard view of your credit, social security, and bank- and other accounts from a single access point.
Unlimited restoration support
The restoration of your identity can be a holy mess that may take years to sort out, but because their identity theft response team uniquely includes professional Private Investigators who specialize in identity theft, victims have an incredible advantage to get a fast start for remedial action.
As a bonus
Since you may suffer damage before the whole mess gets sorted out, their protection plan also covers your losses up to a cool $1 million as insurance against emptied bank accounts and fraudulent loans.
How does the IDShield service work?
When something happens, IDShield will notify you and offer 24/7 emergency assistance so that you can act quickly to limit the damage. Their emergency teams are real, live people and not chatbots or automated services, and their focus is to assist you with unlimited identity restoration services, and unlimited consulting with fraud experts to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible.
IDShield’s family plans offer great value for money, especially if you have teens in your home who may be oversharing out there on social media account! @ForbesAdvisor regards the Individual 3 Bureau Protection Plan as the Best Overall Winner for 2021, and their Family 3 Bureau Plan as Best for Families.
Is identity theft protection the only thing I can use to protect myself?
Luckily, no. The best way to protect yourself is by adopting a proactive approach to scrub sensitive information from the internet.
The abundance of people-search internet sites means that anyone with an ax to grind can do a quick search of your name, and buy all the information they want. It’s best to use a specialist reputation management service to monitor and remove data that gets published without your permission.
OneRep is a reliable reputation management site with state-of-the-art tools that monitor hundreds of people-search sites and use an automated opt-out process to keep your information off the internet, even after the information gets re-published.
OneRep is a prevention tool, while IDShield is the cure.
Also, Read Why is Cybersecurity Important?
Leave a Reply