The Federal Trade Commission has been charged with the education of the American public in regards to their identity and how to properly protect it from being stolen.  In their program entitled “Deter, Detect, Defend” the Federal Trade Commission has outlined what exactly are the steps to take to do just those things.  Under the “Detect” portion of the program, the FTC has outlined exactly what to do in the event that you suspect you’ve become vulnerable to credit fraud.  The first step is contacting one of the three credit reporting companies (TransUnion, Equifax, or Experian) who are in turn required by law to contact the other two on your behalf, and place a fraud alert on your credit reports.  The second step is the close the accounts that you suspect have been tampered with or opened by someone other than yourself.  Ask the company directly for the fraud dispute forms.  If the credit company does not have fraud dispute forms of their own, the use a sample letter that you can find on the Federal Trade Commission’s website.  Send that sample letter to the company at the billing inquiries address as opposed to the address given for sending payments. It’s also a good idea, according to the Federal Trade Commission, to file a police report so that you can in turn provide the credit company with an Identity Theft Report, which will require the company to stop reporting fraudulent information that has yet to be corrected on your credit report.  Again, there is more information available on the official website of the Federal trade Commission.  Once you have completed the process of reporting and correcting any fraudulent information on your credit report, ask the credit company you have been working with to send a letter stating that said company has shut down the disputed accounts and has done away with any fraudulent debts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 3:05 pm 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.