Word: creditably
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...than 3 million Americans a year are victims of that kind of identity theft, according to Javelin Strategy & Research. The average cost to businesses, which usually swallow the losses, is $9,973 per victim. Now legislators and private industry are working to give citizens more ways to protect their credit...
...logical way is to limit the activities of the three credit-reporting bureaus--Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. It's impossible to open a new credit account--honestly or fraudulently--without contacting one of them to determine whether the customer is credit worthy. The bureaus are happy to offer your personal credit report to a lender; that's how they make money. They also sell address lists to firms that send those mailbox-clogging offers of preapproved loans and credit cards...
...believe you have been a victim of identity theft, federal law allows you to place a fraud alert on your credit report for 90 days, legally compelling lenders to ask tougher questions to verify an applicant's identity. A company called TrustedID this week launches a new $7.95-a-month service to handle all the paperwork, every 90 days, to keep an alert on your file always. "The bureaus are inherently conflicted, wanting to sell information that needs protecting," says TrustedID co-founder Scott Mitic. The bureaus, not surprisingly, recommend buying different protection in the form of their monitoring services...
Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, is campaigning for everyone to have the right to freeze credit reports so that the bureaus can't provide your information to anyone without your O.K. Thirteen states have passed freeze laws (although in some states the option is available only to ID-theft victims), and 23 others are considering freeze legislation. Federal measures to protect financial data will be discussed this week by Congress...
Thanks to California's law, Journey has locked her credit report up tight, and urges family and friends to get any protection they can, too. "Not that it does me any good, because my credit is still screwed up," she says. "But my parents recently got a call asking if they were really trying to buy a sofa in the Middle East." They were...