LifeLock review: eRecon can stop identity theft
Captain Jason LaSart, of the Mille Lacs County Sheriff’s Department worked a lot of identity theft cases during his time on the Minnesota Crime Task Force, and he has a lot of stories to tell.
One of them is about a woman in her 60s who filled out a Medicare supplemental health insurance application with her medical information, name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and bank account numbers.
Three months later she began getting disturbing calls and letters from people who said they worked for bill collectors. She always paid her bills on time and had heard warnings about telephone scammers bent on identity theft, so she tore up the letters and hung up on the callers.
Six months after she put the application in her mailbox and raised the little red flag she learned she’d become an ID theft victim–someone in Florida used her information to open at least eight credit card accounts and maxed them out.
The insurance company never received her application. LaSart believes someone stole it from her mailbox and sold her information over the Internet.
So how can this kind of theft be avoided?
Never leave outgoing mail in an unlocked home mailbox. Replace yours with one that locks, or take outgoing mail to a United State Postal Service box.
Personal and financial information is commonly bought, sold and traded over the Internet. Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about their eRecon service that scours the Internet for customers’ information so thieves can be stopped before any damage is done.
Enroll using the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE and pay only $9 a month for the identity theft protection services chosen by nearly 1.5 million other Americans.
