Don’t become a financial statistic
Don’t let the fraudsters get you
Have you ever had things you want to get done, to create, to achieve but life appears to get in the way? Well that has been my world recently. And life getting in the way has not been because of good things but rather because of the data breaches that have been in the news lately (and others that I don;t think we have heard about yet.)
First we had the Target data breach that occurred in the midst of the holiday shopping rush and of course I had shopped there in that window of time. That started the first round of having to take steps to protect myself by contacting credit card companies to have cards replaced.
Fortunately the next two that I heard of didn’t impact me, Neiman-Marcus and Michael’s.
Then came the shock of learning somebody had managed to compromise my checking account. Fortunately I noticed it shortly after they started to charge things against it but it still cause a lot of stress and headaches. First round of headaches was contacting the bank’s online fraud hotline having them replace my account, checks and debit card and file the claim to recover my money. A week later I stopped at one of their branches to ask some questions about some paperwork they sent me to sign only to discover that the online fraud department had handled things incorrectly thus allowing the fraud to pass to the new account. What did this mean? Yet another round of having new accounts set up, hopefully correctly this time, and another new debit card and new checks again. Fortunately the guys at the branch were awesome to deal with and even when I went back a couple days later (having read something incorrectly) we were able to laugh about it when they point out that it was some of the money being refunded to my account not another instance of the fraud. Hey after over a week of the mess I reacted to the name and didn’t notice it was a deposit 😛
And then this weekend there was the news from Kickstarter of yet another data breach. So back to changing passwords. Fortunately I had just done this with every account I could think of so am getting into the swing of changing passwords to more complex ones. But it is frustrating and annoying and stressful wondering who has what data about you.
I have been going through the steps of initiating identity protection services but it doesn’t eliminate the need for pretty much daily monitoring of any and all accounts to make sure there is no fraud occuring.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to make sure you aren’t just ASSUMING that you are safe from this same experience. I know I assumed I was good at protecting myself before but I can’t tell you how many levels of additional protection has been put in place in the days since all this started. Please make sure you are doing all you can to protect yourself, the stress is bad enough but the fear of having your finances drained, of a credit rating you work hard to establish destroyed, that is terrible. I can’t begin to imagine how much worse it is when it is full identity theft compared to what I went through. My heart goes out to anybody that has had to deal with that, as I know a few friends have.
Please don’t become another financial statistic.
