Cagey consumers use to request a free report from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion once per year, spreading the requests out at four-month intervals. You might only find out about those accounts when a merchant slams the door on your request to open a new line of credit yourself. Your first clue may be worried phone calls from friends asking if you're truly stuck in a Dubai airport with no cash, or irate messages from those "you" have spammed.Īn identity thief can also use your personal information to open credit accounts, accounts you know nothing about. Scammers can use a compromised email account to broadcast spam or to send targeted email scams to your contacts. Still, it's better than letting hackers buy an 85-inch TV with your credit.Ĭredit card numbers aren’t the only kind of data that hackers can misuse. Getting a new card is a pain, as any automatic payments you've configured will need the new card number. There’s a good chance you won’t learn about a compromised card until after the bank declines the charges and starts the process for issuing a new card. (Opens in a new window) See all (4 items)īanks are good at fraud detection these days. You can use a personal finance service, such as Mint, to keep an eye on all your credit card transactions from one place. Card thieves will occasionally put through a few small purchases, just to make sure the card is “live,” before making a big purchase. Always read those bills and figure out what every line means, even the small charges. The first clue may be the appearance of unexpected items on the credit card bill. Your credit card could be compromised by a shady online merchant, a card skimmer, or even a waiter in a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Not every hack starts with a well-publicized data breach. The antivirus running on your computer is utterly powerless against a security attack on a faraway server. Don’t imagine that you can prevent a breach. The only upside is that you're one among possibly millions, so the hackers may never get around to weaponizing your details. And you will be affected, if not this time then the next. Frequently the affected service spins up a web page where you can check whether you were affected. When a major hack attack or data breach occurs, it’s all over the news. What can you do when you realize that you’ve been hacked? Either way, they’ll try to make money from their unauthorized access, and they may well do it before you even realize anything is wrong. But it’s just as possible that hackers got access to one of your accounts through a data breach and parlayed their access into a full-on hack attack. When you discover that your personal information has been hacked, your first thought may be, why me? Why couldn’t it have been someone else? In truth, you might have fallen victim for a reason, perhaps a weak, easily guessed password, or a too-public social media account.
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