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A growing concern among all Americans is credit identity theft, which is a very serious threat to any person that has a social security number and/or a credit card. A criminal can commit credit identity theft by stealing a person’s name, social security number and borrowing card number and then it becomes a race to see how much money can be taken and aggravation brought to the victim. How do these criminals get this information?

Credit identity theft criminals also get pretty creative when they walk into a post office and fill out a change of address form, diverting a victim’s mail, including pre approved plastic card offers, bank statements and other tasty morsels filled with information. Criminals have also committed credit identity theft by using electronic devices that store your plastic card information when you use the card at a store to pay for an item. A fraud alert can be placed on any person’s borrowing history file which means that anyone wanting to issue borrowing privileges in the consumer’s name must first contact that consumer.

Many of the services that companies offer to protect a consumer’s identity can actually be done by the consumer for no charge at all. If a person is a victim of credit identity theft, a police report is extremely important to file. This becomes the basis on which extra credit reports can be offered by the three major borrowing history reporting companies. Be sure and write down every person’s name and the date and time of each conversation so that deniability can be quashed if needed.