Long story short-ish, my wife and I BOTH have recently had our “identities” compromised where someone applied for, and opened credit cards using our personal information (SSN, address info, etc). By pure luck, we were able to catch it early enough in the process where only one charge had been made on the account in her name and none yet on mine. We’ve taken steps to report the fraud to the credit card company and all three credit reporting agencies. And it’s under investigation.

There have been several large scale data breaches over the last few years, some of which have compromised the personal data of 10’s of millions of people directly from the credit reporting agencies (Experian specifically), as well as Target, T-Mobile, Home Depot, etc. Even the Office of Personnel Management for the US Government was compromised to the tune of 20+ million personally identifiable information records of not just gov’t employees, but family members as well as personal references given for background checks. So as they say, it’s not if, but when.

You are all allowed one free credit report from each of the 3 reporting agencies (Trans Union, Equifax and Experian) annually. And you can access them more frequently for a fee. I suggest that if you have not reviewed your report/s in a while, you should. Keep in mind, there may be differing info between the three, so it really takes all three reports to get the complete picture. In my case, the newly opened credit card account had not even posted to trans union yet, so if I had only looked at that report I wouldn’t have seen it.

If you have suspicious activity on your report, you can place a 90 day fraud alert w/the three agencies. I’m not too clear on why a FRAUD ALERT is not a default setting for everyone’s account, but I digress. You only need to contact one agency to place the alert and they’re supposed to contact the other two on your behalf. I’ve also read that this is not 100% foolproof either. You’ll also have to call the company where an account may have been opened (Chase and Synchrony Bank in our case) to dispute and close out the accounts as well as launch the fraud investigation. We’re also trying to determine if we need to file a police report once we get the results of the “fraud investigation” but I’m not holding my breath on any substantive information.

There are several monitoring and protection services that you can pay for that will send you alerts of suspicious activity or new inquiries on your credit. But some of these come with mixed reviews. Additionally there are free services that can help you monitor and improve your credit score. But caveat emptor.

Lastly, you can go so far as to place a credit freeze on your account where no new accounts or activity can be created until you remove or suspend the freeze. Like if you know you need to open an account or get approval for a loan. And there is a fee with each credit agency to do this.

Bottom line, check your reports, and be diligent.