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How to Prevent Identity Theft

What can I do to protect myself from identity theft?

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Linda Sherry
Director, National Priorities, Consumer Action
http://www.consumer-action.org  
 

Linda Sherry, Consumer Action’s director of national priorities and one of the organization’s chief spokespersons, joined the San Francisco-based national consumer education and advocacy group in 1994 from a background as a weekly newspaper reporter.

Consumer Action (www.consumer-action.org), founded in 1971, has a national reputation for free multilingual consumer education on personal finance issues.

Sherry, who moved to Washington, DC, in August 2004 to establish an office for Consumer Action, is responsible for the organization’s national advocacy work and for the research and writing of Consumer Action’s free educational publications and web site content. Her recent projects for Consumer Action include publications on home buying, credit card terms and conditions, bankruptcy, ID theft, Internet privacy, cell phones and investing vs. savings. Sherry is chief surveyor and coordinator of Consumer Action’s popular pricing surveys of rates for credit cards and telephone services. She is the editor of Consumer Action’s newsletter, Consumer Action News.

Sherry has received awards for Consumer Action publications from the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators (Excellence in Consumer Education, 1996, 2000 and 2003) and U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs (1995 National Consumer Week). Sherry serves as a member of the National Consumers League Fraud Alliance steering committee.

Before joining Consumer Action, Sherry was managing editor of AsianWeek in San Francisco from 1991-1994. Previously she was a reporter at The Almanac newspapers in Menlo Park, CA; The New York Times Long Island Section and The East Hampton Star in East Hampton, NY. She was the founding editor of the Sag Harbor Herald, a weekly newspaper in Long Island, NY.

What can I do to protect myself from identity theft?

In this video, Linda Sherry details the best ways to prevent identity theft and what you can do if you think your identity has been stolen.

This expert: 28,866 views

This series: 6,598 views

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Identity

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Internet

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Abuse

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Stolen

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Scam

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Transcripts

Linda Sherry: Hi! I am Linda Sherry of Consumer Action and today, we are going to be talking about how you can prevent becoming a victim of identity theft.

Speaker: What can I do to protect myself from identity theft?

Linda Sherry: I think the first think you need to do to fully protect yourself from identity theft is to take a need to know attitude about when people ask you about personal information. When someone asks you for your Social Security Number, you should say, why do you need that and could I perhaps replace that with just password that I create. The second thing you really need to do is look at your credit report and you can get free credit reports every year and you should really take advantage of this and look at the credit report and make sure that no one opened up fraudulent accounts in your name.

You should also monitor all your bills; don't just not to open a credit card bill, for instance, because there may be evidence on there that someone used your credit card without authorization. When you get mail at the house or receipts or that kind of thing that contained personal information, make sure you shred them up carefully and throw them away. That's a really big step in preventing identity theft because many thieves get this information out of the garbage and then use it to defraud you.

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