One of the most basic forms of identity theft protection is free. It’s the ability to request a 90-day fraud alert to be turned on with one or all of the major credit monitoring agencies. The purpose of a fraud alert is to improve the chance that a potential creditor will not grant credit to an identity thief.

If an identity thief obtains your personal information, for instance, they might try to open a line of credit with a big computer manufacturer who sells directly to consumers, purchase the computer on credit and then have it shipped out (yes, this happened to me) .

Fraud alerts ask the potential creditor (the big computer manufacturer in my case) to use “reasonable policies and procedures” to verify the applicant’s identity as actually being who they say they are before issuing the credit line in your name. The steps that a potential creditor takes to verify the applicant’s identity may not actually alert them to a case of identity fraud but it does heighten the awareness that the credit application should not be rubber stamped without some level of scrutiny.

You only need to call one of the three big credit bureaus to put this in place. Here’s a link to information about the credit agencies to get you going: http://bit.ly/e3d8F3