In the aftermath of AT&T’s announcement on Saturday that 73 million people’s accounts were compromised in a data breach, many consumers likely have questions and concerns for their own wallets. With that in mind, the personal finance website WalletHub has some tips for how potential victims can keep their financial info safe.
You can check them out below, followed by additional commentary from WalletHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou, formerly a senior director at Capital One.
- Sign up for 24/7 credit monitoring – This way, you’ll find out immediately if someone tries to open an account in your name. WalletHub, for example, offers free 24/7 monitoring of your TransUnion credit report.
- Enable Two-Factor Authentication – Start by changing your password on your AT&T account and enabling two-factor authentication. Then, proceed to enable two-factor authentication on your email and financial accounts. This will make it harder for fraudsters to infiltrate other aspects of your life.
- A Freeze Is Better Than an Alert – If you really want to protect yourself from fraudulent borrowing, freeze your three major credit reports (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion). This will prevent anyone but you from accessing them, thus making it impossible to take out a loan or line of credit. A fraud alert, in contrast, doesn’t actually do much.
- Suppress Fraudulent Info – While you can dispute run-of-the-mill credit report inaccuracies, it’s best to use a process called “suppression” / “blocking” to get rid of negative info resulting from identity theft. In short, this makes it so the records in question can’t make reappearance after they’re initially removed.
- Never Respond to Unsolicited Requests for Information – Don’t be surprised if you see an uptick in unsolicited calls and emails requesting personal information. Just remember: Never answer if you didn’t ask to be contacted.
- Time to consider premium identity protection – There is only so much you can do to protect your identity for free, and with all the breaches and the sophistication of fraudsters, it is worth considering premium identity protection features like identity theft insurance, premium identity alerts and access to identity restoration experts.
“After all the major data breaches in recent years, it’s a fair assumption that your personal information is already available to fraudsters and scammers. As a result, traditional methods of protecting yourself from identity theft are no longer sufficient, especially with artificial intelligence making impersonation easier than ever. Consumers should therefore think about premium ways of protecting their identity. Free services probably won’t tell you about suspicious bank accounts opened in your name, for example, or changes to your USPS mailing address – just to name a couple of important things.”
– Odysseas Papadimitriou, WalletHub CEO
For more advice, check out WalletHub’s identity theft guide as well as the steps you should take if your identity is stolen.
