I don't personally believe there is any value to Lifelock, unless you need their legal services after the damage has already been done. As far a preventative measure goes, they do not have access to any secret/sensitive info about you that you cannot already access yourself for free.
- You can pull your credit bureau reports once per year for free. To maximize the utility of this, you should stagger those requests by four months instead of requesting all three at the same time.
- You can pull your consumer banking record from ChexSystems once per year. This file will have information on interest bearing accounts that can be reported to the IRS -- all those banking products that can be opened online or at a branch with no credit reference (checking, savings, cd, etc ...). This file is used to help guard against money laundering, check kiting, and ACH scams.
- You can view your consumer marketing profile for free at aboutthedata.com. This is a service provided by Acxiom, which is one of the largest data brokers in the US. This information about you is bought and sold by advertisers to determine how you are marketed to with direct mail. This data can be hit-or-miss. In particular, household income can be wildly inaccurate because it is culled from census figures. This information isn't "sacred" per se, but I point it out only because it is widely available and could be a point of entry into id theft/fraud profiling. (Disclosure: I work for one of the largest data brokers in the United States. No, not Acxiom.)
- You can get weekly/monthly credit monitoring features through most credit card issuers today, as well as a variety of Web sites such as Mint and Credit Karma. Experian now runs their own portal, and it's free as long as you decline the FICO score numbers. See:
https://usa.experian.com/#/registration?offer=at_ecwd100&br=exp
- You can use a wealth management site/account aggregator to see all your charges and account balances on one screen. I like Personal Capital for this. I check it every morning while I have my first cup of coffee. It only takes a few minutes and I instantly know the real-time balance for everything, get bill pay reminders, can see how personal investment accounts and retirement accounts fared the day before, and know when dividend reinvestments from stock positions trigger.
Outside of proactive monitoring, which you can do yourself and entirely without fees/subscriptions to anything, practice good habits to mitigate risk and give you some latitude to spend through the damage should your identity be stolen and an account or two is drained.
- Have a 'feeder' account for payroll direct deposit with no debit card access on this account. Transfer an amount necessary to a second account which does offer debit card/check drafting access in the event you need it. The idea is to split your bank held cash reserves so you cannot be drained by a breech at one account. You might even split funds across three or four locations if you've got CDs or kids' savings account. Of course, you want an 'emergency fund' that: is liquid, can be withdrawn without penalty, is difficult enough to access for yourself or spouse that it is protected from impulse spending,
and is relatively high yield (for whatever that's worth these days). But it also
must be there when you need it. Period. All your other accounts being frozen because of ID theft is a prime example. This is an instance where a high yield online only savings account (like the 1.05% APY Barclays accounts) come in really handy for parking three months worth of emergency cash.
- Never,
ever use a debit card backed by a cash based account for anything other than withdrawing the cash from your banks' in-network ATMs. This is probably the biggest one that people screw up. A debit/check card might be authorized to use a particular payment network, but the funds cannot be guaranteed by Visa, MasterCard or the issuing bank against fraud. If the card is compromised and your back-up account gets bled dry and overdrawn, you could very well be SOL. This doesn't even account for non-fraudulent, non-malicious activity that could freeze you out of your money when you need it, such as a computer network error at your bank that renders transaction authorization unavailable for a period of a few hours, or double-posts transactions (this particular bug hit Park National Banks a few years ago -- it was a fucking mess. My wife had no idea how much money she had in her checking account for nearly two weeks). In short, and reiterating the previous point, if you have a debit card and
must use it, the balance of the account behind it should never, ever be more than you can afford to completely lose.
- Don't use paper checks unless it's absolutely necessary. It's 2016, there are better, more secure ways to get money to other people. You should never put a paper check in the mail. It has your name, address, bank routing number, and bank account number. There are crime rings now where people steal payment envelopes from mailboxes to gather routing/account information to reuse personally or resell.
- Have credit cards. Several. I know a lot of people are scared of credit cards. If you have the discipline, between the signup bonuses and the rewards, it's time people reconsider their use. I now use credit cards for EVERYTHING, and I currently carry seven (to maximize gas, grocery, and restaurant rewards, plus carrying cards that do 5% back in rotating categories on things like department stores, home improvement, online spend, etc...). I'll say it again, I now pay EVERYTHING on a credit card if it is an option, including my municipal utilities, phone, cable, Internet, and auto insurance. Those five things alone manufacture nearly $8000 of spend annually, which equates to hefty rewards when paid on a 1.5% or 2% cash back card. I pay off the credit cards every month in full four to five business days before the close of the billing cycle, so they report with a $0 balance and I never pay any interest. I always carry my cash back balances forward through the entire year, so I can redeem all of them as statement credits in January the following year, essentially making my Christmas shopping 100% comped.
I no longer put paper checks into circulation that carry my routing/account number. The only time I use my checking information is to pay my mortgage and my electric bill with AEP, because those are the two things that I cannot pay with credit, and even those are done via ACH transfer online, so no check and no stamp enters the postal system. I have written one paper check this entire calendar year, and that was $350 to a repairman that replaced the blower motor in my HVAC in July.
If your credit cards ever wind up compromised it's no big deal, you call the issuer and they flag the fraud, rollback the charges, and issue you a new card.
Lastly, sign up for paperless billing on everything where offered. Not only is it good environmental sense, but it eliminates from postal circulation mail that has any identifiable information about you. It also eliminates it from winding up in your trash.
