The damage done by identity thieves is so insidious, like water seeping into a basement, that it can hours, weeks, months and even years to undo the damage.  Without taking the necessary steps to protect his or her personal information including banking information, social security number, birthday, et cetera, the victim is setting him or herself up for a massive headache in trying to repair the damage done by the crafty thief.  As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  While the general human mentality is “it would never happen to me”  the truth is closer to “it could happen anyone.” The steps it takes to prevent identity theft are a fraction of the time and effort it takes to repair the damage once it is done.  According to the ITRC Aftermath Study of 2004, a victim is looking at a possible 5,840 hours to correct the destruction done by an identity thief.  To put that number in perspective, that amount of hours is equivalent to working a full time job to two years!!  That number is, of course, a rare extreme, but to that particular victim who did have to spend that time fixing his or her identity problems, that number is a sick reminder of how easily it might have been protected. The numbers for the average victim are much lower, but still enough to make the victim’s head spin.  That same study reports that it takes 330 hours to correct damage done on the average. It also reports that 26-32% of victims spend between four and six MONTHS working on undoing the destruction caused by their identity thief.  And to make matters worse, 11-23% of the victims spend a walloping seven months to a year repairing damage.  Those are startling figures.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 6:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.