With the cases of identity theft on the rise world wide, one must do their best to ensure the safety and security of the personal data and information.  There are a few ways that you can minimize your risk of identity theft.  These are as follows:

-  Before you give anyone any personal information for whatever reason you must ensure it’s absolutely necessary to do so.  Always ask the bank, credit card company, school or any other organization whether its absolutely required to give a social security number or date of birth.

-  Make sure you know when bills are meant to arrive so that in the event one falls out of cycle by not appearing, you follow it up with the relevant company or organization.  The reason being of course is that if the mail has been stolen, personal details from that mail could be used to inflict financial and credit harm on your relevant records.  When you contact the company in question, check when the last transactions have been made in order to ensure the data or sensitive information hasn’t been compromised

-  Treat you mail like gold and protect it accordingly.  Do not post your outgoing mail in your own personal letterbox.  Insert it in locked bags at post office boxes and the like.  This will ensure the minimum amount of people to touch and have access to your personal mail. Also avoid placing checks in the mail for whatever reason to avoid ‘check washing’, which is becoming increasingly common nowadays.

- Protect your accounts by having passwords for each.  And this includes separate phone banking passwords and pins.  This will add a further level of identity theft protection to your personal data and information and make it harder for criminals to access that data.  Also ensure you do not use names of people you know or names of pets for pins and passwords.  This is the worst thing that you can do because a savvy criminal knows that most people use such names as passwords, and will attempt to guess those passwords accordingly.

- Limit the amount of cards you carry around in your wallet or purse.  As any bank card or credit card can be used for some identification purpose.  Only carry the cards you actually use and require.  There’s no point in carrying more than what’s actually required, setting aside security issues, it also makes practical sense.

- Make sure you shred all of your personal transactional statements, banking and any other personal data that is of a highly sensitive nature.  Don’t just throw it in the bin; flush it down your toilet if you have to.  Criminals will go through rubbish bins looking for this type of data and thus make sure you handle it accordingly.  Store your personal data and sensitive information in a safe place at home.  Better yet, buy a safe and put it in there.  A criminal who robs you, will just as likely take data more so than your TV in these modern times.

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