Fraud has become such a large problem, that a week has been dedicated to fraud awareness around the world – November 6-12, 2011. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) is urging organizations around the globe to focus awareness toward this growing problem. Businesses are asked to take a proactive approach by promoting anti-fraud awareness and education.

There have been recent articles by The Wall Street Journal, Lifehacker.com and Consumer Reports that offer helpful information on how to protect yourself on and off-line. Many identity theft blogs offer tips as well. It would even help to read accounts of those who have had their identity stolen, just to see the impact it would have if it were to happen to you one day. Have you ever received a letter from a company, agency or institution informing you that their data records have been accessed and that you are being notified so that you can take the proper precaution? They might even offer you a year of free identity theft monitoring services, to help put your mind at ease. However, did you know that identity thieves will often keep and either sell or use that sensitive data long after they have acquired it? An identity thief could steal your social security number and not use it for several years. They are waiting for victims to let their guard down, before using the data. After all, will your social security number change in 2-5 years from now? Will your name change? You get the point.

LifeLock has been offering not only identity theft protection services to consumers, but also educational instruction to law enforcement officials nationwide for several years now. This is in an effort to help combat this growing problem of identity theft. There is much work to be done, and many people are unaware of the impact that this can have on them personally and on their families. It is important to be aware of this problem and to join the many that are working to help with the effort to detect and prevent identity theft and fraud.

Whether you choose to monitor your credit yourself, or to use a credit monitoring service, be sure that you don’t ignore this growing problem. Have you seen your credit report lately? If so, did you recognize all of the items listed? If you did not, take steps to report any theft of your credit. Also, regularly check bank and credit card statements for any unusual activity.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2011 at 9:47 am and is filed under Articles Concerning Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.