Kevin McCormally: I am Kevin McCormally of Kiplinger's and I am here with Jane Clark, an Associate Editor of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. Jane, we hear about it all the time, Identity Theft, it's a growing problem, what is it?
Jane Clark: Identity Theft is when someone uses your name to apply for credit or to get into your bank account or even to commit a crime in your name. It's someone who takes your information and uses it for their purposes.
Kevin McCormally: Wait a minute, how can somebody use my name to apply for credit?
Jane Clark: Well, they could get your name from the mail or they could steal it from your wallet or your purse and they can use that information to get into bank accounts or apply for credit and have the credit application sent to a different address.
Kevin McCormally: Okay. So how would I know that I have been a victim of Identity Theft?
Jane Clark: You don't necessarily know it. You would have to find out from your credit report and unless you get a credit report you don't always know that you have been a victim.
Kevin McCormally: So how would you know with a credit report to be an account there that you've never set up?
Jane Clark: That's right. You can see unfamiliar information and find out that someone has been using your name.
Kevin McCormally: Okay. Let's say that I am a victim, how I clean things out?
Jane Clark: You immediately contact the credit bureaus and ask them to put a fraud alert on your report. You contact the creditors to make sure that they know that someone else is using your name and you keep a record of all of these transactions so that you can demonstrate later that you try to clean it up and you should also file a police report so that, that too is on record that someone has been using your name.
Kevin McCormally: You should call the cops?
Jane Clark: You should call the cops, they probably won't arrest anyone because it's very tricky with different jurisdictions to ever find or mail these people. But you should at least have a report that someone has done so.
Kevin McCormally: Okay. Thank you very much!
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