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How to Resolve Identity Theft

What should I do if my identity has been 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 identity has been 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: 28,900 views

This series: 9,604 views

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Tags:

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

Speaker: What should I do if my identity has been stolen?

Linda Sherry: The first thing you need to do, if your identity is stolen is to get a police report and you should also order free copies of your credit report. If you've already got your free copies for the year, go ahead and pay for them because this is very important. Once you've put a fraud alert or an ID theft alert on your credit report, you will be able to get more free copies in the future. When you have got your police report, you go to the FTC and download -- the FTC is the Federal Trade Commission, identity theft clearing house, they offer a free affidavit that you can download and fill out. You can note or write it if you want to, but you are not required to and together with the police report and the fraud affidavit, you can send these materials to any company that is saying that you owe money when you are victim of ID theft and that should help clear up your good name.

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