A stolen identity can take months, even years to repair. As a result, a stolen identity can affect your credit, mental health, and emotional well-being. Here are some tips to protect your identity.
Protect Your Identity
Thieves have many ways to trick you into trusting their offers and suggestions. Follow these tips to protect your information and identity:
- Use strong passwords that are unique for each website. Use a combination of caps and lower case letters with numbers and symbols for the best protection.
- When shopping online, look for the 🔓. This lock-in front of the website URL is one way of knowing security measures have been taken to protect the website.
- Permanently destroy documents containing personal information that you no longer need. Shredding or burning these documents, for instance, will keep them from getting into the wrong hands.
- Install protection on your computer or device to protect against viruses, spyware, and malware.
- Monitor your accounts for unauthorized activity. Report any questionable activity immediately to your financial institution.
- Finally, do not click on links from unrecognized email accounts or text messages. Emails and texts can be copied to look very similar to the real thing.
So, thieves have become very crafty at stealing your identity. Using caution can end up saving you a lot of trouble. For more information on protecting your identity, go to https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft.
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