Free, personalized help for victims of identity theft

Friday, January 29, 2016

If you are a victim of identity theft, help has arrived.

Identity theft victims can now get a free, personalized identity theft recovery plan online from the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) at IdentityTheft.gov.

Available in both English and Spanish, the site asks victims to describe their personal experience with fraud. The FTC then explains the specific steps consumers need to take to recover their identity—for free.

IdentityTheft.gov offers easy-to-use tools that enable identity theft victims to create the documents needed to alert police, credit bureaus and the IRS to contain the fraud.  Victims will be asked a series of online questions to tailor a recovery plan to their specific case. The website also provides a step-by-step list of actions and provides prefilled forms and letters that can be sent to specific agencies to speed up the recovery process. The FTC also explains consumers’ options to help repair the damage such as setting up a fraud alert on a credit file.

The FTC doesn't ask for sensitive information, such as a social security number or driver license number, so online identity hackers would not be able to tamper with your case.

Over 490,000 reports of identity fraud were filed with the FTC in 2015, which is a 47 percent increase from the year before.

For more information on how you can protect yourself from ID theft, download Consumer Action’s guide ID Theft & Account Fraud - Prevention & Cleanup (available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean).

 

Consumer Action empowers low- and moderate-income and limited-English-speaking consumers nationwide to financially prosper through education and advocacy.