
The news about consumer credit information and identity theft keeps getting worse. ·In March 2005, information broker LexisNexis admitted that ID thieves, using stolen passwords from legitimate customers, had stolen personal information on as many as 32,000 U.S. citizens form one of its databases. ·That episode was preceded a few weeks earlier by a similar problem at another large data broker, ChoicePoint Inc. There, thieves—also impersonating legitimate businesses—stole personal financial data on as many as 145,000 people. ·About the same time, Bank of America announced that it had “lost” personal financial information related to some 1.2 million federal government employees (including some members of congress) with BofA credit cards. These problems—and the concern that more announcements are coming—have caused some calls for greater government oversight of the consumer credit information industry. But will more government rules really accomplish anything? Silver Lake Publishing’s new book CREDIT SCORES, CREDIT CARDS: How Consumer Finance Works/How to Avoid Mistakes and Manage Your Accounts Well makes the case that consumers need to protect themselves from ID theft by knowing more about how the credit system works. “It’s easy to schedule hearings on Capital Hill where politicians can rant about security breaches. Especially when some of their own information has been stolen,” says Silver Lake editorial director James Walsh. “But we’ve got laws on the books that regulate how personal financial information is used by credit bureaus. The real problem is that consumers don’t pay enough attention to who’s got their information. In an economy that relies so much on consumer credit, that’s really bad.” There’s no way that a consumer can make sure his or her information in a credit bureau’s databases is absolutely secure. But the best method of prevention is to watch that information closely—and recongize errors or abuses as soon as possible. CREDIT SCORES, CREDIT CARDS give readers an eight-point process for making sure their information at the major credit bureaus is accurate and as secure as possible: 1)Get a copy of your credit report from each of the three major U.S. credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion). 2)Make a copy of each report. 3)Mark up each report, focusing first on any errors in your name, address or other contact information. 4)Next, review all credit accounts in the report. Make sure that they reflect the right names of lenders, the right account numbers, current balances and proper payment histories. 5)If you find errors on the credit accounts portion of a report, make copies of your own bills or statements that show the right information. (If you have to contact the credit card company or lender to get this information, do so.) Attach these support documents to the marked-up copy of the report. 6)Write a
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