What to Do if Identity Thieves Take Over Your Financial Accounts

Stopping identity thieves requires timely alerts, quick action, and expert support

While checking your financial statements, you’re hit with an unpleasant surprise: unauthorized withdrawals from one or more of your banking, brokerage, investment, or retirement accounts. You recognize almost immediately that you’ve become a victim of identity theft. Someone—posing as you—has illegally accessed your finances and is now starting to drain them. What to do?

The vast majority of identity theft involves financial fraud. It’s a growing problem, with a 140% increase since 2020. And it doesn’t only occur with credit cards; it can happen across a wide spectrum of financial vehicles, including savings or checking accounts, brokerage accounts, IRAs, money market funds, or loans.

If your financial institution has suffered a data breach in which your personal information—such as your name, password, birthday, contact information, account numbers, or Social Security number—has been potentially compromised, the institution is obligated to alert you via a breach notification letter. The problem is, often the institution doesn’t even discover the breach until weeks or even months after the fact. By that time, cyberthieves could have already infiltrated your accounts and hijacked your identity.

Don’t panic. There are steps you can take to mitigate the damage from a financial account takeover. Better yet, there are proactive measures you can take to protect your privacy and identity, and help prevent this situation from occurring in the first place.

Act Quickly: Time Is of the Essence

Here are some tips on what to do if you suspect fraud in any of your financial accounts:

• Financial institutions have time limits for reporting losses. It’s in your best interest to contact the institution as soon as possible if you discover a problem.
• Have the affected account closed and have the account number changed.
• When setting up new login credentials (username and password), use a password manager to create and manage strong passwords.
• If the affected account has login credentials that you use for other accounts, change the credentials for those accounts too.
• Set up multi-factor authentication on your financial accounts. It adds an extra layer of security.
• If you have credit or debit cards associated with the affected account, cancel them.

Stay One Step Ahead with Privacy and Identity Protection

How can you help avoid becoming a victim of this kind of financial fraud? And how can you better ensure a full recovery if it does happen to you? Take a proactive approach: Have a plan in place to protect your privacy and identity.

With an IDX Complete plan, you’ll get a full range of powerful tools and services covering privacy protection as well as identity monitoring and recovery. These include Credit Management Services, with 24/7 monitoring of your credit report and credit score. You’ll be automatically alerted to any new financial activity in your name, so you can act quickly if anything seems suspicious.

You’ll also benefit from identity theft insurance covering reimbursement costs for eligible expenses up to $1 million. And you’ll have access to IDX’s dedicated care team, who are experts at identity recovery. Should you become victimized by fraud, your IDX advocate will work with your financial institutions and the credit bureaus to make sure your identity and reputation are fully restored.

Having your financial accounts hijacked by identity thieves can be a devastating experience, especially if you were counting on those funds to pay your bills, achieve your life goals, or fuel your retirement. If it’s happened to you, act quickly to limit any losses. By establishing an identity and privacy protection plan, you’ll not only get professional assistance with recovery, you’ll get a vital early-warning system that can help you stay one step ahead of the fraudsters.