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How to Resolve Identity Theft

What should I do if my purse or wallet is lost or stolen?

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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 should I do if my purse or wallet is lost or stolen?

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: 36,890 views

This series: 12,428 views

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Id

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Theft

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Identity

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Fraud

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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 from Consumer Action and today we are going to talk little bit about some advice for people who have become victims of identity fraud.

Speaker: What should I do if my purse or wallet is lost or stolen?

Linda Sherry: The first thing you should do before your purse or wallet is ever stolen, you should write down a list of the things you keep typically in your wallet or purse and the contact numbers for those companies that issues to those cards; so that could be your credit cards, your bank card, your voter registration card, your library card, all those things that you really going have a hard time thinking of hen your purse or wallet is stolen.

So, take that list that I hope you have created by the time purse or wallet is stolen, and look at it and call all the companies, notify and especially start with the credit card company, the ones where the thief could actually do some real damage with the cards or the bank card, etcetera. Call up, in most cases those accounts will be closed or cancelled and you will be issued new cards.

Then the other thing, follow-up with the all other companies; then I really recommend that you get your credit report and you can get your free annual credit report; if you haven't got it already or just pay for one, because this is the place where if, for instance, you had a Social Security Card in your wallet and you had your address and you had some other key information about yourself in the wallet, a thief has just found a bonanza. An ID thief is having a great day when he finds all that stuff.

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