There is nothing worse than finding yourself on the stink side of an identity theft case.  It means some crafty fool stole your mail, or your login and password information, or stood over your shoulder while you punch in your password, or stole your wallet, or knew what kind of password you might choose, or guessed a weak password, or found your credit card at a bar, or set up a phishing site and tricked you into thinking it was the real site and thereby stealing your login information.  It sucks to feel duped and it can leave you feeling utterly lost and without a clue as to what to do next.  The Federal Trade Commission understands that feeling and has been charged with making sure the American Consumer knows exactly what steps to take to protect themselves from become victims and to arm them with the tools necessary to fight the battle to correct any fraudulent activity on the part of the criminal.  Many people who find that their particular brand of identity theft had come in the form of Social Security number theft or fraud wonder if they should apply for a new number.  The Federal Trade Commission warns against that.  In some cases, the Social Security Administration will issue a new Social Security number (if you ask them to) but only as a last resort.  And having a new Social security number may not end the other problems and may well bring with it a whole new crop of problems.  Old credit information is associated with new credit information (under the new number) so it doesn’t erase the fraudulent credit.   It does, however, make it look as though you have no credit history and makes it much more difficult to get any kind of credit.  Better to take care of problem than trying to scrap the whole thing without dealing with it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 3:10 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.