ID Intensive: Recovering an Identity and Precious Time

​Alan* is a MyIDCare member in southern California. A few times in the past, he’d gotten letters saying his personal information might have been exposed in a data breach, but this time it was the real thing. A credit card showed up in the mail that he hadn’t applied for. When he called the credit card company, they said that he must have requested it and that there were already over 700 dollars worth of charges on the card. He cancelled the card, and then he had to figure out what to do next. Here’s his story.

​“This is unfortunately going to happen to everyone at some point. You find out someone has stolen your identity, and you don’t know what to do about it. The police came over and took my full statement, then explained that most of the people doing this are overseas and they can’t catch them. I guess you have to put your own safeguards in place.

​Fortunately, I had signed up for MyIDCare after discovering that I was part of a data breach. I can’t remember when I signed up, but I’m glad I did. I had two recovery advocates during the process. It was painless, and I was surprised how responsive they were. I got helpful, personal answers to my phone or email questions within 24 hours, not an automatic response saying “We’ll get back to you within 3 weeks.” It was great to have one person to talk to, who could guide me through the process, how to protect myself and avoid problems going forward.

​They told me there were two options: do a complete credit freeze or put a watch on my credit file. They explained which forms I needed to fill out and which ones I didn’t. When I went to the credit bureaus, I found out the thieves had also tried to get another credit card, but apparently they didn’t have enough information, so that was refused. Still, I wonder why it’s so easy for someone to get a credit card in your name. Obviously there aren’t enough checks in the system. I ended up doing a formal freeze with one credit bureau and setting up watches with others. Eventually, I wanted to buy a house so I took the freeze off.

​The average person doesn’t even know where to start dealing with a problem like this. For example, normally you have to pay to set up freezes or watches with the credit bureaus. I wouldn’t mind paying once, but why do I have to pay three companies to do the same thing?

​Recovering your identity is not an intuitive process. I could probably have figured it out by spending a ton of time online but who has the time to do that? My advice is to engage professionals like the people at MyIDCare. If your identity is ever stolen—and it happens to most of us eventually—having an expert to guide you and answer your questions is so worth it. It drastically reduced the number of hours I had to spend doing something that I didn’t want to have to do in the first place. All in all, it was just a good experience.”

* Names have been changed to protect the identity of our members.