Tons of Personal Information Stolen, Fraud Alert Placed

March 29, 2005 By Jonathan Ping 3 Comments
My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

Yay. My credit card was already stolen last month, and now I come home to see that my personal information, including Social Security number, name, date of birth, and address was leaked by my school via a stolen laptop. Why is all this information, which supposedly spanned three decades, sitting in an unattended laptop?? Seriously, people!

So, I grudgingly did some research on how to deal with this, and found this official FTC site on identity theft. The first step was to file a Fraud Alert at one of the three major credit bureaus:

Experian: http://www.experian.com

Trans Union: http://www.tuc.com/

Equifax: http://www.equifax.com/

You just have to contact any one of them (I used Experian), and that credit bureau will automatically notify the other two. Also, you will be sent a credit report for free from all three bureaus (no credit score). Ha, at least I get some more free credit reports, although I just pulled them.

Specifically, I filed a “Initial Security Alert”, which lasts 90 days. You can extend it out to 7 years with a police report. Now, supposedly if someone wants to open any credit in my name then the credit bureaus must notify me. But I never gave them my phone number, so I’m guessing that they’ll notify me by mail? That might be an inconvenience if I do want apply for a credit card (no more instant approvals), but I suppose it’s worth it.

Now to wait and see if anyone tried to steal my identity. Stupid school.

Filed Under: Credit Cards
Last updated: February 23, 2012
My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.

User Generated Content Disclosure: Comments and/or responses are not provided or commissioned by any advertiser. Comments and/or responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any advertiser. It is not any advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Comments

  1. Michael says
    March 29, 2005 at 11:35 pm

    I have the Credit Alert on mine also, thanks to a nifty situation several years ago. Once I inserted my cell phone # into the body of the Alert (this had to be done in writing, of course), then any requested-by-me credit approvals became not so much of a problem.

    Before that, when the phone number wasn’t there, the only things I received in the mail were letters of “Sorry, we can’t open an account for you, thanks to your Credit Alert” from card companies. No attempted validations of my request for credit ever appeared, by mail or otherwise.

    So you might want to look into adding a phone number to the body of your Alerts.

    Reply
  2. jp says
    March 30, 2005 at 11:46 pm

    Thanks for the tip, Michael! I’ll definitely look into this.

    Reply
  3. Dog says
    May 12, 2007 at 8:44 am

    Thanks for the info. I am forwarding this to my friend as his card jost got stolen.

    Reply

Speak Your Mind

*