Identity Theft Protection Options When Buying a Home

Identity theft protection might help when buying a home.

Anybody who is buying a home in Sacramento might want to consider signing up for a free trial run of credit monitoring and fraud detection, including identity theft protection, before applying for a loan and while your mortgage is in process. Because it seems every time you turn around, some agency is getting hacked. The I.R.S. has had to send out thousands of letters to citizens informing us that some of our data might have been exposed. The New York Times say the IRS hacking is worse than reported. If your major corporations, your banking institutions and your government are not secure, what is?

About a year ago when Home Depot was breached, part of the settlement was to provide its recent customers with a free one-year subscription to credit monitoring and identity theft protection. This is how I became registered with such a company because it would never occur to me to sign up otherwise. Yesterday the company called to say new credit information showed up on my credit report and asked if I had initiated such a thing.

Now, those of you who follow my blogs might recall the situation with a Citibank Custom Credit Line. This happened about a month ago when Citibank mailed a 12-page letter without an account number or other identifying information apart from my name and address to inform me a Custom Credit Line had been opened in my name. Without my permission nor knowledge. I spoke to a supervisor and demanded they reverse the Citibank Custom Credit Line without affecting my credit. In other words, I did not want the account merely closed, I expected it to vanish, and was assured it would happen.

The reason the credit monitoring company called was to inform me that Citibank had placed a new account on my credit report for its Custom Credit Line. Granted, the date I received the letter was August 17th, and yesterday was September 11th, so almost a month had passed. The company asked if I had opened the account. After I explained that not only did I not open the account, it was not supposed to show up on my credit report. That’s when they told me it had also been closed on my report.

Good news is the identity theft company is able to remove it all together from my report. They are also placing fraud protection on my account for free for 90 days. It can be extended for 7 years, they promise, if I file a police report against Citibank, which I will gladly do. Citibank had no legal right to do what it did. They also suggested I deal directly with TransUnion because of the 3 reporting agencies, TransUnion is the most consumer friendly. Good tips, I’d say.

I can’t recommend the best identity theft protection company to you; you’ll have to do your own online research, but it seems that Consumer Reports ranks Identity Guard as #1, followed by Identity Force as #2 and Lifelock trailing as #3.

Any consumer agency, though, will tell you that the best identity theft prevention is you. Use common sense. Don’t access your banking accounts from a public WiFi. Put credit alerts on your personal accounts. Change your passwords often, and make them complicated. And remember, during the mortgage process to buy a home, you don’t want anything to mess up your credit reports. Besides pulling your free credit report from Annualcreditreport.com., you might want to sign up for a trial basis for an identity theft protection. Just record the data so you can stop the service prior to being charged for a full year if you find you no longer want it.

All information is secure online until the day it isn’t.