Embrace the New Year and Your Financial Health by Protecting Your Identity in 2008
By Mark Pribish, Director of Identity Theft Management Services 
Merchants Information Solutions, Inc.

According to Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia), “ a New Year’s resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to project a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous.  The name comes from the fact that these commitments normally go into effect on New Year’s Day and remain until the set goal has been achieved, although many resolutions go unachieved and are often broken fairly shortly after they are set.”

That said, the start of 2008 is a new opportunity for you to embrace some positive changes in your life – as well as an opportunity to embrace and protect your identity.

Standard New Year resolutions typically include new goals relating to physical fitness, weight loss, improving your personal finances and savings, spending more time with the family, professional development, changing careers, and more.

However, a common oversight – especially with personal finances – is resolving to protect your identity and the identity of family members.

Identity theft is a real problem for both consumers and business – and while individuals have little to no control over how a business is securing their personal identifying information – consumers can take control and resolve to be proactive in protecting their identity.

Most consumers can increase their education and awareness of the challenges of identity theft by reading the news each day; and by linking to various identity theft related websites including: www.privacyrights.org, www.consumer.gov/idtheft and http://www.idtheftcenter.org.

In addition, consumers should resolve to learn more about cyber crime (committed by fraudsters using computers and the internet), mules (where fraudsters recruit unsuspecting individuals to act as middlemen), insider crime (by current former and employees), pharming (the process of redirecting internet domain names), phishing (where authentic looking email is fraudulent in soliciting personal information), physical records (that are located at almost every hospital, doctor, dentist, insurance agent, employer group, division of motor vehicles, financial institution, utilities) and more.

Consumers can add to their resolution list by using a shredder, changing passwords on a regular basis, consider on-line bill paying (which is statistically safer than using the mail), and protecting your computer from spy ware and viruses.

Consumers should resolve to access each of their three credit reports once every four months in the New Year through www.annualcreditreport.com.   This central site allows you to request a free credit file disclosure, commonly called a credit report, once every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies including Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

So as you and your family consider the numerous resolutions to begin the New Year, you should commit to a project or lifestyle change that includes increased awareness and action to protect you and your family against identity theft.