In the previous post I wrote about the test that revealed serious misuse of your personal information by IRS staff. If you’re shocked by the careless atitude of IRS employees in regards to the disclosure of such vital piece of information as people’s SSN, just read this post and you might grasp the whole scale of the problem.

What would you say if I tell you that the personal information of 26.5 million US military veterans plus the records of 1.1 million active-duty personnel are right now in the open and can be used any moment for [tag]identity theft[/tag] or worse?

How in the world could it happen? Human mistake, as always. Last year the laptop of the analyst working for the Department of Veterans Affairs was stolen from his home in Montgomery county, Maryland.

Though this guy had absolutely no right to take such sensitive information home, he was doing it for quite a while, just because it was convinient for him I guess.

When his laptop was stolen, all these data was stolen too. As a result, the information about millions of american soldiers is now floating somewhere completely unprotected.

And if it would fell in the wrong hands, the potential damage could be enormous. Considering this data concerns active millitary personnel, terrorist would probably pay a lot to get their hands on this laptop. I still haven’t heard that this laptop is found. So the real threat still exists.

You can read the whole story at Guardian. The article is named “US troops at risk from civil servant’s stolen laptop“.

So what’s the point of this story? It’s quite simple actually. No one really cares about safe-guarding your SSN, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, your address, etc. So it’s up to you to make sure this information is not used by con artists or indentity thieves.

Until the law is passed that will prohibit companies to request SSN from you as a mean of authentication, your SSN will always be at risk.

Now the obvious question. If you have absolutely no way to make sure your SSN and other information of similar importance is protected, how can you ensure that it won’t be used by identity thieves?

There is no perfect answer to this question. But there are some ways to mitigate the risk.

The answer below is only relevant for US residents. If you live in other countries, you might have similar services, so read on, it will give you idea what to do.

By the US law you’re allowed to request your credit report from each of 3 major credit agencies free of charge once per year. It certainly is not enough to make sure you’re not a victim of identity theft, but at least it’s a start.

Most likely you need to be able to monitor your credit more frequently. You need a system that can alert you the same day some strange activity happened on one of your bank or credit card accounts. The timely alert will allow you to react accordingly and stop the identity theft at the very beginning.

There is a credit monitoring service that does this. It provides comprehensive credit file monitoring and automated alerts of key changes to your Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion credit reports (three major credit report agencies), plus it gives you Free 3-in-1 Credit Report and unlimited access to your Equifax Credit Report™. What is also important, it gives you Identity Theft Insurance with a coverage of up to $20,000 to help you recover from possible identity theft.

Get Equifax Credit Watch Gold 3-in-1 Now! Or if you just want to start somewhere, and are not ready for credit monitoring service, at least request your free credit report to make sure you’re OK. 

Get your FREE credit score Today!  

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.