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What should I do if my identity has been stolen?

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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.

Expert: Linda Sherry

Director, National Priorities

http://www.consumer-action.org

Email: editor@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 More »