| robustpuppy |
09-29-2004 09:58 AM |
SSN
Quote:
Originally posted by greatwhitenorthchick
I'm a spaz and lost an envelope I was about to mail on the way to work. Unfortunately the envelope is addressed to my insurance company and contains my SSN. Although the city is full of good people that will pick up my envelope and stick it in the mailbox, it's also full of unscrupulous characters who will open it up and use my SSN for nefarious purposes.
Is there anything I can do in the event it falls into an unscrupulous person's hands? Will a credit agency monitor my credit for suspicious activity for the next few months?
The form inside the envelope only has my SSN and address (which is soon to change) - it doesn't have any credit card info, passwords or anything like that.
Any help would be appreciated. thanks.
|
You should find out whether you can put a fraud alert in place at the credit agencies. They might monitor activity for you, and if they didn't, a card issuer would certainly be willing to do this for you -- for a fee, of course. Given that your address is soon to change, and forwarding is unreliable, you should try to take some extra care, because you are even less likely to receive notice that something had been opened in your name.
You might also be able to put a block on credit reporting to new creditors without your consent -- as I understand it, mortage brokers and lenders often do this (purportedly as a precaution) while financing is pending. When I was in the middle of a refi I applied for a Corporate Amex through the firm and to my surprise, Amex wanted to pull my credit reports, but couldn't do so without my consent because the lender put a block on access.
In theory, then, nobody could open a new account that required a credit check without your being notified.
And like Not Bob said, don't overstress about it. I don't think identity thieves rely on accidental discovery of social security numbers; they probably prefer to steal them en masse from the computer networks of major financial institutions or from dumpsters of major NY apartment buildings, and we can't do anything about the former anyway. |
