Identity Theft Speaker Expert 2of2 www.IDTheftSecurity.com

And phishing. Talk about phishing. What is phishing? Phishing is when you get those emails that Chief talked about at the beginning of the program. Emails that look like they're coming from PayPal or eBay or from your bank asking you to update your account information for whatever reason. Or they are the Nigerian 419 scams, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. Phishing is when identity thieves continually throw their line out all day, every day, trying to catch a fish. They're looking for somebody that they can get hooked on their line, essentially, that will believe their ruse, that will provide them with information to allow that hacker, that identity thief, to access their accounts, or for you to actually give them money right up front. There's so many different ways they try to get the data and so many ways in which they use it. Well, here is an example of a Bank of America phishing type email. It starts off saying that they've detected irregular check card activity. We detected irregular activity in your Bank of America check card. For your protection, you must verify this activity before you can continue using your card. Bank of America, Citibank, Citizens, Eastern Bank, they will never ever ever send you an email telling you You've had irregular check card activity, you need to log in to update your account. They're not going to do that. Only identity thieves do that. So anytime you ever get an email that looks like this, just hit delete. Now what's scary about them is they look really legitimate. For example, this one has all the Bank of America logos. It might even have your name in it. It might even have bits and pieces of your account number in there for whatever reason. And also it has www.bankofamerica.com, and it's spelled properly. So you think, well, it has the bankofamerica.com link in it, maybe it's legit. No, because what they do is they manipulate the code, the web code, the HTML code. While it might look like it's going to bankofamerica.com, In the background of this email, see with the internet not everything is as it appears sometimes. In the background code of this email, that link actually goes somewhere else, more than likely to a computer that's been compromised somewhere that's being used as a server to store your information temporarily until the hacker gets it. So the reality of it is, you get an email like this, just hit delete. Credit, how many of you have checked your credit reports yourself? How many times you personally, you, not the bank, not the automobile dealership, you personally have checked your credit within the past year? How many? Good. That's about half the room. I need the other half to do it tomorrow. Very important you check your credit. Your credit is your financial well-being. You go to the doctor, you get a checkup. They draw your blood, they check your red count, your white count, your cholesterol, your pressures, all this kind of other thing. They do that to determine what your health is. And based on those results, they tell you to make changes, start doing this, stop doing that, and so on. It's the same thing with the credit report. It is your financial health. Understanding what's going on in your credit report will enable you to prevent identity theft or to respond to an existing identity theft. Theft. Checking your credit report is relatively easy. It's getting easier and easier every single year. The credit bureaus themselves are becoming more and more user-friendly. There is information in the back of the handout about the credit bureaus, but at this point in time, I'm going to point you towards annualcreditreport.com. This is free. You can get 3 credit reports every single year, one from Experian, one from one from TransUnion, one from Equifax. It's free. And you, you can see your credit reports on the internet. You can download them, you can print them out, you can also order them through the mail. And when you go to annualcreditreport.com, you can essentially find out if in fact your credit is in order or if there are opened up accounts under your name that you did not authorize. You've got to pay close attention to your credit report. I believe you should check your credit at least Every 6 to 9 months minimum. Understanding what's going on on your credit report is essential these days. Really good question. If you have young children, should you freeze their credit? If you can. It's not easy to do so. The only way you can freeze a child's credit is if a child has credit. And under the age of 18, a child is not supposed to get credit. Actually, under the age of 15. A 15-year-old can be signed on to your credit card, okay? If you're a parent, you have kids, you can sign your 15-year-old onto your credit card. Why would you want to do that? Well, only if you wanted to freeze your 15-year-old's credit, because under the age of 15, a child is not entitled to credit. They're not of any legal responsible age to do so. So they're not supposed to have a credit report to begin with, okay? So you can't freeze someone under the age of 15 who does not have any established credit. You can't freeze their credit. That's a problem. I wish you could, but you can't. But what this company OneU does is they actually monitor your child's credit from birth. Whatever their age is, they monitor your kids' credit, making sure that they check to see every 6 months if there's a credit report taken out. If there is, you're notified of it, bam, you go ahead and you freeze their credit. I've been getting a lot of emails from ex-spouses whose ex opened up cards under the kids' name. A lot of hardship going on out there right now. We're in a really funny economy right now. People are desperate. You got parents stealing kids' identities, you know, exes stealing exes' identities, like it's getting really ugly out there. Ugly. So your fraud alert is actually a really good thing, and what it does is that it requires anybody who is gonna open up new accounts under your name to call you prior to that account being opened. So if anybody wants to open up a credit card under your name, including you, or get a loan under your name including you, you personally have to be called in order for that account to be inactive. That's what a fraud alert does, but it only lasts for 90 days. However, there are new services out there in the market. This one right here is OneYou at OneYou.com, and what they do is, is they put a fraud alert on your credit for you and they keep it going beyond that 90 days. They redo it every 90 days from that point on. You don't have to worry about it. They have a $1 million service guarantee in the event your identity is stolen. They basically take care of it for you. They watch your back. They do all the restoration part of it. Remember that $175 to $600 I was talking about in restoration, to restore an identity? They do all that for you. Nowadays, with identity theft being the problem that it has become, and you see what it has become. You're crazy not to invest in some type of a technology in this day and age that's not going to watch your back and protect your identity. Because the days of not worrying about identity theft are over. Now we have to worry about it. So now what's happening is entrepreneurs are coming up with solutions to the problem because government isn't doing enough about it at this point, because the system of identification isn't going to change drastically anytime soon. There's something called the REAL ID Act that's coming into play, which is going to beef up the form of identification we have now, but it's not going to solve the problem. Services like this that provide you with a continuous fraud alert, along with a million-dollar service guarantee, and essentially wrapping a security system around your identity, will definitely help to protect you Basically, it'd be a no-brainer for you. You don't have to think about it anymore. This is an investment that I would recommend that you all make. This is for $10 a month or $100 a year. You wouldn't think about driving a car without car insurance or having kids and not having life insurance or a home without home insurance. Nowadays, this is something you have to do.