Here's a few sobering facts about your credit report.
The information in your credit report can lose you a job or a place to live.
There were nearly 250,000 reported cases of identity theft last year.
The average identity theft victim spends 175 hours and $800 cleaning up after the crime.
70% of all credit reports contain some kind of error.
Financial experts have advised for years that people should check their credit reports from ALL THREE credit reporting agencies at least once a year to scan for errors and problems. With the recent publicity of high profile cases involving security breaches at major credit card companies and financial institutions, their advice takes on ominous urgency.
The fact is that checking your credit report regularly can alert you to possible identity theft before any damage is done to your credit at all, and save you the equivalent of a month's work and salary to get things cleaned up.
Taking their cue from current events, a whole throng of companies have turned the science of credit monitoring into a $2.5 billion a year industry. Credit monitoring combines access to your credit reports with some sort of fraud-alert activity reports on your credit. The best of the bunch include monitoring your reports at all three credit bureaus and provide you with notification within 24 hours of activity on your account. The cost? About $100 a year.
Identity Guard offers one of the most comprehensive packages available. It includes daily monitoring of your credit report as well as quarterly updates, and $20,000 in identity theft insurance.
Competing plans include TrueCredit, offered by TransUnion, one of the three credit bureaus, may offer less comprehensive packages that suffer from concentrating on only one credit bureau, or using a non-Fico credit score.
In some states - notably California, you may place a fraud alert in your file for any reason. If your file is marked with a fraud alert, the credit reporting agency may not give out any information about you on inquiries - which means that no credit will be issued in your name.
Banks are also aggressively marketing their own credit monitoring services. Among the best, the credit watch from Washington Mutual, which includes a quarterly report compiled from all three credit bureaus and daily reports on any changes or inquiries into your credit report. The cost is a mere $10 a month.
Whether you choose to sign up with a credit monitoring service, or monitor your reports yourself, the experts do agree that you should be doing something. With a new case of identity theft happening every 79 seconds, you need all the protection you can get.
For more information about your credit report and how you can protect it, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s web site here: http://www.ftc.gov/credit/
26 Aug 2005
