Step3 Prophet

Getting Rid of Junk Mail

  I've been through a lot of changes in the past few months: moved into a new rental house, bought a new car, bought some expensive equipment for the car using a store 0% financing offer.  While I'm excited to make the changes, one thing I'm less than thrilled about is junk mail. Whenever you apply for credit, buy magazines (which USPS offers you upon a change of address), or buy a house your name and address gets sold around to all kinds of advertisers, so you start getting lots of "PREAPPROVED" and "IMPORTANT OFFER" letters in the mail, which are annoying at best and could be very dangerous to your credit if they fall into the wrong hands. Not to mention those "cash advance" checks that could easily cost you hundreds of dollars with just a signature. So what can you do to make it stop?

  If you look at the credit card offers, usually they will include an OPT OUT notice with a number you can call to not receive pre-screened offers. I did this successfully several years ago. Since I move locations fairly often, most of my mail went to my parents house and I would collect it every few months. I went from getting 20-30 offers a month down to 3-5. After my most recent move and credit applications, however, the flow "SPECIAL OFFERS" has gone from a trickle to a fire hose spray once again. I've recieved 10 in just the past two weeks!

  How to stop credit card offers: When it comes to credit card offers you need to do two things: Call each company who you have a card with, and tell them not to send you cash advance checks. This usually takes a few minutes for each company. To stop new credit offers from companies you don't currently do business with, you can call 1-(888)-567-8688 (That's 1-888-5 OPT OUT) or go to www.optoutprescreen.com. By calling or using the website you can get a five year opt out in place. To permanently opt out you must sign and mail in a form available on the website. It took me less than 5 minutes to complete the web resgistration.

  To deal with offers from companies you already do business with is a little more difficult. You have to contact each of them directly, because they have a legitimate reason for having your name and address. Some sites make it easy, for instance, the American Express website has a communications center where you can tell them not to send you any "special" and "valuable" offers from them or their affiliates. Just look under Alerts and Communications, then under Privacy. Other companies you will just have to call the company and ask the customer service representative to remove you from their list.

To make other direct mail offers go away: The easiast way should be to go to dmachoice.org  which is run by the Direct Marketing Association. It feels kind of like going to the devil to make a deal, but from what I've read online it works. I tried to sign up, but I had trouble regeistering with them. Once I hit submit to send in my registration form, it just took me to an empty page with their header and footer. I tried re-registering with the same result, so maybe I should expect an email? I don't know, so if I don't hear from them by tomorrow, I'll try again or write them an email. Supposedly there is a $1 fee to get on the OPT OUT list, but I didn't make it that far in the process.

Once you have opted out, it will take awhile for companies to get the word. DMAChoice.org says to give it 90 days. During that time you should see your junk mail taper off. On the down side, the opt out is only good for 3 years, then you have to renew your opt out with DMAChoice again. Also, companies you have a relationship with (ie you've ordered from them before) need to be contacted directly to remove your name and address from the their mailing list.

Where to go for more info:

http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Junk-Mail

http://www.ecofuture.org/jnkmail.html

Active Duty Fraud Alert!

 Today I went to establish my credit fraud alert like I said I would yesterday. As I was looking over Experian's site, I couldn't help but notice something interesting. An Active Duty Alert. That caught my since I'm currently Active Duty in the military. It said it was good for one year, which is 4  times what a fraud alert would get me, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

I found this site from the FTC. Sure enough, to support military members who may not always be able to check up on their credit, the FTC instituted a military fraud alert. It's pretty much exactly the same as an initial fraud alert, but it last longer. Something else I didn't know was that when you place a fraud alert or military alert with one company, the must report it to the other bureaus for you.

So I went ahead and clicked on the link and filled out the form. They asked me a few questions like they would when you request a credit report. I love the trap questions. "Our records show that you took out such and such a lone on this date. Who is the loan with?" Since I didn't take out a loan on that date it's an easy none of the above.

After I finished I saw this screen:

As you requested, an Active Duty Alert has been added to your credit report. This alert will expire after one year. As an added precaution, we have removed your name from prescreened offer mailing lists for two years.

As a convenience to you, we will notify the other national credit reporting agencies, Equifax and TransUnion, of your request for an Active Duty Alert. You should receive confirmation from them directly.

If you suspect that your identification information has been or could be used fraudulently, you can also add an Initial Security Alert to your credit report.

Cool . 

Afterwards they let me view my credit report. I'm not sure if it counts as one of my free annual credit reports, or if it is because I placed the fraud alert. (Fraud also gets you a free credit report). I did end up disputing an old phone number of mine that I haven't had in years. 

I also saw some other interesting things. There have been no hard pulls on my credit report for years. A hard pull is when you apply for a loan or new credit card or mortgage and the creditor looks a your report. A large number of those will bring your credit score down.

I saw many soft pulls on my credit as well. My previous annual credit checks by myself showed there. Prosper shows up as well, but not Lending club. For some reason Equifax did a check on what Experian had on me.

Now I can sleep a little better at night.

(image by Newright via flickr)

Identity theft Protection

It's been a week now, and I said that I would make a decision on what I need to do with regard to protecting myself from Identity theft. The answer, as it turns out, is not to buy another service. But lets look at what I found first.

Credit monitoring

First did a search for credit monitoring services. There are a number out there, offered by the three credit bureaus as well as by third party vendors. Services run from $60-$180 a year and offer as frequent as daily monitoring of your credit report from 1 or more bureaus. While doing that search, I also came across this consumer reports article about credit monitoring. They were not kind to the credit monitors. CR brought up a few good points.
-Credit monitoring doesn't stop anything
-It could take 2 months for fraudulent transactions to appear on your credit report
-Credit monitoring won't even notice certain types of fraud, like Social Security number fraud

One thing I didn't know was that the Credit bureaus can't tie your SSN to you name. The only way for them to verify who belongs to which SSN is to ask the Social Security Administration, but the SSA won't give them that info. So instead they create fragment files for each time someone uses a new name, address, date of birth, or social security number and try to match these stub files to existing accounts. Some one who applies for credit with your SSN and their name would create such a stub, which won't be seen or affect your credit profile until it is matched at a later date. This could take years.

MIsconceptions

As for the type of credit fraud that got me thinking about ID theft protection: it would also fly under the radar because it's an existing account.The thieves stole names and credit card numbers of people with existing credit accounts.There is no way that credit monitoring services would notice anything amiss because your account isn't adding new credit, its just exercising existing credit.

The good news is that you are already protected from this type of fraud. I forgot this last week, but Credit card companies can only hold you liable for the first $50. The key here is to review you credit card statements frequently. 

How to be proactive

There are a few ways you can be proactive when it comes to stopping new credit accounts from being created with out your knowing. You can place a fraud alert on your account with each of the three credit bureaus( Experian, Transunion, and Equifax). This will make anyone who wants to look at your credit report, and who isn't already authorized to do so, call you to get permission first. A lender will not be very willing to extend credit to someone if they can't look at their credit report. A fraud alert is free, and it's good for 90 days. There are actually services that will do this for you. LifeLock is one that is gaining in popularity. For $10 a month they will place a fraud alert with all 3 credit bureaus every 90 days. They will also give you your free credit reports( which you can get from annualcreditreport.com) and help you get back your identity if you are a victim of identity theft. Another similar service is LoudSiren. These are all things you can do on your own for free( except for the their insurance policy which pays for expenses related to getting your identity back) if you want to take the time and effort. 

A better way to go might be to issue a credit freeze on all your accounts. Unless you have been the victim of identity theft already, this will cost you about $10 per credit bureau. A credit freeze stops anyone but existing creditors from looking at your account, and its good for 7 YEARS or longer. You must lift the freeze if you are going to apply for a loan, new credit, or some other things like new utility service or cell phone service. It's $10 to lift the freeze and then another 10 to reinstate it. Still, that means you would pay about $30 to set it up, and if you only apply for credit once a year it could be as little at $20 to maintain it while still having access to "new money". Considering you would pay $90-$110 annually for the same service from the above companies, that is quite a savings.

Another thing you can do is opt out of receiving junk mail credit offers. I did this quite successfully a few years ago. Since I was moving around quite a bit, I had all my mail sent to my parents house. The bulk of the mail that was received by my parents for me was credit offers. So to prevent them form storing boxes of junk mail offers for me, I called up the number on the credit offer and requested they no longer send me those offers! After about 3 months the stream of offers i received became a trickle and then practically non-existent. 

What am I going to do?

The credit freeze options sounds like a good idea. The only problem is that since I have engaged in a credit card arbitrage plan, it would make applying for new credit next year difficult. That combined with the fact that I don't know where I'll even be living next year, makes this a tricky proposition. I don't want to be caught paying interest on $15,000. So here is the plan for me:

-Continue to monitor my credit card usage monthly

-Continue to get my free credit reports from annualcreditreport.com 

-Place a fraud alert at all three credit bureaus. I'll let it expire and then apply for my next round of credit to further the arbitrage scheme. After that I may place a freeze.

-Use the junk mail opt out clause to reduce the number of credit offers I get. Since I've applied for credit at my current address, that put my name and new address back in the list and the number of credit offers I've recieved has been increasing. I've let this slide since I'm wait to see if something really good comes in, but now I think the risk out weighs the reward. 

Anyone else have any good proactive measures to take to prevent credit fraud?

(image by fpsurgeon via flickr)

Credit Card Fraud in My Major U.S. Retailer?

Today on CNNMoney.com there was an article about a credit card fraud ring getting busted. Here is a link to the article. The tagline said nine major U.S. retailers were affected by this fraud, and since I shop a major U.S. retailers this caught my attention. Reading further I found that the fraud was accomplished by

"hacking into the wireless computer networks of retailers including The TJX Companies Inc. (TJX, Fortune 500), whose stores include Marshall's and T.J. Maxx; BJ's Wholesale Club Inc. (BJ, Fortune 500); OfficeMax Inc(DOH!). (OMX, Fortune 500); Barnes and Noble Inc(DOH!). (BKS, Fortune 500); and Sports Authority, among others. "

The DOH!'s in red are my own additions, based on the cross section of retailers I shop at. Just because the ring is "busted" doesn't mean the data is no longer out there. There is really nothing you can do to protect yourself from this short of not using credit cards and canceling all your accounts. The risk will always be present if you use credit cards. See my post on the BNY Mellon Data loss for another example.I think that there are too many advantages to using credit cards (responsibly), so what can be done as a defensive measure?

First, if you haven't checked your credit reports recently at AnnualCreditReport.com then you may be in for a shock. That is going to be my first step since It's been about 3-4 months since I checked on my last one. Checking one every 4 months might not be enough these days. I'm going to be looking into credit monitoring services in the near future. The one offered by BNY mellon didn't really enthuse me at the time, so I'll see what else is in the offering. Goals should have definition and limits, so I'll set a goal of evaluating credit card monitoring services by next Tuesday(August 12th) and deciding if I want to purchase one.