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Step 2: As I said in my previous post, “Initial Fraud Alerts” are the next step in protecting your credit. This flags your accounts, so that if someone attempts to open a new account in your name extra identification will be required. If you are a person that likes to take advantage of those instant approval credit deals like “Buy now, no interest or payments until 2020″ this could make your life a little more difficult. When you place an initial fraud alert on your account you can also leave a phone number with them, which they should contact you on if someone tries to open a new account in your name. My research indicates that this does not negatively impact your credit scores in any way.

Each of the 3 credit reporting agencies maintains a phone number you can call to establish the fraud alert:

I set one up for myself and my wife, so I tried two of them so far (Experian and Transunion). I felt like Transunion’s version was a little easier to navigate, Experian kind of puts you through menu gymnastics to get it done.

You only have to notify one agency, they will notify the other two agencies on your behalf. An initial fraud alert is only good for 90 days, so you need to do this every 90 days, the upside, it takes only about 5 minutes per person, you could easily do it on your commute (another reason to like Transunion, they have speech recognition). I recommend adding an outlook recurring task to remind you to do this every 90 days.

Step 3: Monitor your credit report, after all it’s free.

Time spent on this step: 15 minutes.
Time spent so far: 45 minutes.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Identity Theft. 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.