Credit Reports and Identity Theft Protection | Know Your Credit Report

Believe it or not, one of the best ways to prevent identity theft from ruining your life is to make sure that you have an idea of what is happening with your credit. While you may think that the only thing that you can do is to make sure that your credit card balances are okay and make sure that no one is charging anything extra to your account. But, there is much more that you can do in the way of identity theft protection. One of those ways has a lot to do with your credit reporting agencies.

Credit reporting agency

A credit reporting agency tracks the accounts that you have, your balances on them and even figures out for other lenders if you are a good risk or if you are a really bad one. Whenever you go to open a new account, the credit grantors will look at what the credit reporting agencies have on you and make their decision based on that. If you have poor credit ratings listed there, you may actually be getting the interest rates or the loans that you want and that you deserve. For most people, this is because they have mismanaged money or have quite a bit of credit as it is.

Yet, it may be because someone that got a hold of your personal information is now using it against you.

If someone opens a credit card account using your social security number, you are going to run into a problem. But, it will likely come up on your credit report that you have this additional account. For that reason, you need to make sure that you know what is on your credit report, on a regular basis, so that you can insure that what your credit grantors see is really what you have earned.

To do this, you should at least monitor your credit report on a yearly basis. In the South Africa, law has been put into practice that says that the credit reporting agencies are required to provide you with a free credit report of yours each year. There is no reason, then, that you should not have a report in your hand to check for identity theft.

You should take a close look at the information listed there. Look for this.

• Is there an account that you do not have? This may be something that is new or old.

• Is there a false address listed on your report? If someone tried to open an account with your social security number with a different address, this is going to show up here.

• Are there any other mistakes on your credit report including inquiries into it that you may not have made or allowed to be made?

Identity theft protection comes only when you know what to do to protect yourself. You should know what is being reported about you on your credit report. If you haven’t looked at yours lately, now is the ideal time to do so.