What is Identity Theft and how do you know how

What is Identity Theft and how do you know how Safe you Are?

If you have been reading the technology columns lately and you wonder about what is identity theft , it's possible your wandering mind might at some point wonder if you could already be a victim. There is a website that helps you find out if you are: MyIDScore. This online tool has been around for about a year now. Once you get to the website, you just fill in your personal information - name, date of birth, address and phone number, and your Social Security information. The site then attempts to place you and asks you a number of questions about who you are; it goes through every digitized financial transaction record it has and finds out if anyone else appears to be using your personal information. This technology has been in use for a while now, and it helps banks find out how far to believe the personal information that clients bring in when they apply for a new credit card.

MyIDScore calculates your ID security by using the identity database that belongs to ID Analytics. The database holds millions of pieces of personal identity data - people's names, their contact information, their Social Security numbers - information they glean from change of address forms and other sources. You'll know that there's been fraud done, if it finds it there has been an application made for a loan or credit card, and the address listed is yours. Almost all people get the safe low score of around 300. Anyone who gets a higher score than that, will be asked to get in touch with a nonprofit organization called the Identity Theft Resource Center for a free investigation. This could be a lot of help if this is the first time you're venturing in this direction wondering what is identity theft and how it can affect you. But for anything more heavy-duty than that, there are more established ways of checking. You could check your credit report from time to time, for instance.

Of course being able to check your identity score on demand can possibly turn you a bit complacent, and have you lower your guard, which isn't a good thing. But are other ways too in which such an identity theft notification service may be less than useful. For instance, MyIDScore isn't as comprehensive a search as it should be. It doesn't look at all the credit card issuers or pay any particular attention to direct deposit account information. And medical identity theft doesn't show up either. There have been a few cases where people have had MyIDScore give them a free pass, and still discovered that they've had instances of what is identity theft show up. Nothing is perfect though; even credit reports from the major credit bureaus are well known to go out with missing details. What you have here still is a very useful tool; ite gives you a free snapshot of how much you have to worry about.