Can you really protect yourself from identity theft?

Americans lost $12.5 billion to online scams last year, according to the FBI. That’s a record amount, up 22% from 2022. But there are ways you can protect yourself.

“You need to realize that you’re up against international organized crime rings,” Herb Weisbaum, contributing editor of Checkbook.org, told KIRO Newsradio. “They’ve reached so many databases in the past few years that you need to assume now that your personal information, your social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, credit and debit card numbers, birth dates, passwords, pins have all been stolen and are on sale on the dark web. So you need to get serious about protecting yourself.”

Weisbaum said that one of the only proactive things you can do to protect yourself against financial fraud is to freeze your account at credit reporting agencies like Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. “Ask them to freeze your account. That locks it up,” he said. “So if a bad guy who has your social security number is trying to open a bank account or take out a credit card or a loan or rent an apartment in your name and has your social, they can’t use it because the accounts are frozen. They can’t run the credit check.”

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Weisbaum explained that it is a myth that freezing your accounts automatically lowers your credit score. “And you can unfreeze it literally in seconds. If you need to have a credit check, like you just have to have that Macy’s credit card and get 20% off when you’re holiday shopping or something, you unlock it, they do the credit check, and you go back. So freeze your accounts at all three: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.”

Weisbaum said another way to help protect yourself is to have all your passwords connected to multiple factor authentications. “Microsoft Security said the worst password with multiple factor authentication is better than the best password with none, because if they steal the good password and data breach, they can still use it, but if there’s multiple factor authentication, they can’t use it. It’s one of the best things you can do.”

Another thing you should be doing is to regularly check your financial accounts and, while you are there, set up security alerts.

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“For instance, if there’s a foreign transaction, I don’t do foreign transactions,” Weisbaum said. “If a check’s written for a certain amount, if there’s an ATM withdrawal. All those things can be instant alerts to your phone or to your desktop to let you know something’s happening, to alert you again. The faster you realize there’s a problem, the easier it is to correct that.”

He said that if you are cruising along with an 800 credit score and all of a sudden it drops to 600 and you haven’t done anything differently that should create a concern.

“Maybe somebody’s using your credit cards or opening credit cards in your name to do something,” Weisbaum explained. “So you can use the credit scores as a fraud alert system.”

He said that if you get word of a data breach, change your passwords immediately. Also credit monitoring never hurts, but it cannot prevent identity theft or something bad from happening.

Weisbaum also recommended a San Diego-based nonprofit called the Identity Theft Resource Center, (888) 400-5530.

“It was started many years ago. I met them, a husband and wife who both were victims of identity theft. You can talk to a trained counselor who’s got all the cheat sheets and knows all the numbers you got to call and everything you need to do.”

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, here and email him here.