Posts tagged "credit card security"

Good Ways To Prevent Identity Theft On Your Credit Cards

Prevent identity theft is important for everyone, but maintaining all personal information private and hidden from others is impossible. For example, at a restaurant, an individual’s credit card deals is taken for bill payment and returned only after some time, with copies can be made easily. Identity theft is now becoming one of the fast growing crime, and here are few tips to prevent identity theft.

Do’s and Dont’s tips to prevent identity theft from offline

1) Protect the credit card details with the passwords and alter the passwords or PIN regularly. To prevent identity theft of your cards is always to choose a unique and new password that cannot be easily judged by other people.

2) Don’t choose mother’s maiden name as the password because this is already printed on the credit card and it is harder to prevent identity theft issue as hackers can easily guess it.

3) Don’t  put outgoing mail into the box and raise the flag to notify the mail carrier that there is mail that needs to be taken. Unfortunately, this also tells the criminal element that there is something that can be stolen in the mailbox.

4) Before sharing any kind of personal details, with the information gathering services such as government agencies, creditors, merchants, employers, and educational services, check the nature and reason for gathering the personal information to prevent identity theft.

5)Don’t throw away bank statements, credit card bills and other financial documents without giving it a second thought. This is a gold mine of information for the identity thief. Always shred sensitive papers before throwing them away to avoid this problem.

6) Always take care before filling out any form that asks for any personal information. One should not fill their banking account and credit card details on any form.

7) Check the information of credit card report carefully, and report if any personal information is altered or removed.

8 ) Don’t share the account numbers and credit card details over phone and always tear the pre-approved credit card applications before throwing them out. One should verify their credit card report and their billing report each month to find out any fraudulent charges, and report them immediately to prevent identity theft.

9 ) All the information placed on the personal or business website such as financial information, or any sensitive customer information should be password protected and encrypted properly.

10) Never open or click any email that request you to validate or change the username or password of the bank account or credit card details.

11) Don’t install other 3rd party software that you don’t trust until you did some antivirus scan or get advice from you antivirus support team. I know it’s hard but you need to do this to keep yourself safe.

12) Modify all the browser setting to improve protection to prevent identity theft and delete all the Internet history and information regularly. Finally, a good solution is the personal awareness to prevent identity theft.

13) Check the system with all the latest update version software and repair all the security issues at once.

14 ) All the forms including loan application should be properly tear before throwing them to trash. Protect the personal computer with password and also, restrict the access to all others is useful to prevent identity theft from online.

15) Monitor your credit report and look for errors. Everyone is eligible for 1 free credit report per year from each of the three major credit bureaus – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can order these free credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com. The most effective way to monitor your credit is to stagger your free credit reports and get a free credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus every 4 months.