Personal Financial Health Season

As we approach Thanksgiving and get inundated with pleas to spend a lot of money for the upcoming holidays, I declare this the beginning of Personal Financial Health Season. Why? Because this is the time that fraudsters, identity thieves, and other miscreants target our wallets hoping that we we’ll be spending too much money and be too wary to be diligent about our finances. Remember the Target breach of 2013 and use it as a reminder that we as consumers are easy targets this time of year.

US: Please Come Down Hard on JPMorgan

The U.S. Government needs to come down hard on JPMorgan Chase for its woeful performance in disclosing and responding to a privacy data breach that reportedly affects 76 million customers.

Free market principles can, eventually, affect cybersecurity change. When data breaches like the 40 million record breach at Target in late 2013 and the 56 million record breach at Home Depot earlier this year, customers can effectively respond with their feet. That reportedly happened with Target, and anecdotally, I’ve become a much more frequent patron of both my local town hardware store and Lowes. By withholding business from organizations that suffer a breach of your personal and financial information, customers can punish the company financially. It may take a lot of customers to really have an effect on the bottom line, but when they act in unison, customers are an economic force to be reckoned with.

Identity Theft: Be Prepared for the Long Haul

Nearly a month after first detecting a potential identity theft when reviewing my credit reports, I’m frustrated by the lack of progress despite my efforts. A recent email from Experian, the credit bureau that seems to be the source of my problems, highlighted the company’s refusal to remove what I believe is the root cause record on my report. Just when I thought I was entering the final phase of cleaning up my credit report, I came to realize that I’m probably just getting through an early chapter in what will be a much longer story.

Identity Theft: Proof that Life is not Fair

I spent a weekend fuming over the fact that my credit reports from two bureaus showed a fraudulent collection from Dish Network and several personal information entries that listed names, addresses, and phone numbers on my report that were not mine. There were several possibilities for the entries: 1) The bureaus screwed up; 2) Someone fat-fingered my social security number when providing credit for Dish Network service; 3) Someone had fraudulently used my social security number. No matter how little control I had over the initial event, if I wanted clean credit reports, I knew that no one was going to help me out.

Identity Theft: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

“What is your identity?” It’s more than just an existential question, it’s a question that you need to ask yourself when addressing a potential identity theft situation. To be more precise, you have to ask yourself, “What is it that identifies you?” To begin the recovery process once you detect an identity theft, something that I discussed recently in relation to my own issue, you have to be able to provide documentation that assures everyone involved that you are who you say that you are. Perhaps even more important is the inverse, that you need to be able to show that you aren’t who you say you aren’t.

A Victim of Identity Theft?

I believe that I am the victim of identity theft.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. Perhaps my understanding of how personal data flows and security drove me to discount what it was I was seeing as “really no big deal.” Or, maybe I have become so cynical about how the definition of identity theft has expanded to include acts that I wouldn’t naturally consider a “theft” that I disregarded the event. Whatever the root cause of my denial, I’ve moved on. It’s time to deal with the problem and I plan to share my experiences every step of the way.