id theft fraud prevention

J. M. Smith asked:




Let’s start with this analogy. You’re a home owner and the fire department calls you to tell you of a new service they offer in case you were to experience a fire.

The first service is complete monitoring. The fire dept will monitor your house 24/7 and let’s say they discovered one early morning your home had a fire while you slept. Their monitoring service would then call your home alerting you to vacate because they have detected a fire. Although this would be a great service and potentially life saving you still have the fire to put out.

Having a monitoring service for ID theft is great and better than nothing but if you become a victim what about the work it takes to report it to all the necessary authorities.

The second service they offer is an upgrade. Let’s say now they would not only monitor your home but they would also send out a truck. When the truck arrives they pull up to the house, someone gets out and gives you an instruction book. They’ll show you how to hook up the water hose, turn all the right knobs and how to direct the hose to the fire for correct positioning.

Silly, but this is like ID theft resolution services. You become a victim of ID theft and resolution services will walk you through the steps to clean up the mess or put the fire out. It’s still your time on your own with guidance. Some folks literally have to carry with them the rest of their lives proof that they have been a victim.

The third service they offer will monitor your home, send out a truck but then also pay you back for the damages you have. Well, since you really didn’t know what to do with the equipment and although the fire dept. helped out;You experienced more damage than had the fire dept. been able to put it out themselves and not only that, their service is underwritten by some insurance company so you could still have the potential of being denied.

ID theft reimbursement services are just that. They are are underwritten policies that you still pay a small premium too every month. They know the FTC’s stance on your timeline of responsibility to notify them if you become a victim. Also, who walks you through the process? What’s that persons experience? and do you have the time away or at your place of employment to make all the necessary calls? The average victim spends an average of 600 hours to fix the problem. That’s 15 40 hour work weeks. Will your employer allow you the time off?

Here’s the fourth service. The fire dept. will monitor your home, call you if they detect a fire, send out a truck as fast as they can and instead of walking you through the process they put out the fire and not with rookies but veterans and when the fire is out they begin to build back what was damaged to it’s original condition before the fire with the best and most experienced contractors in the area. Complete restoration to it’s original condition before the fire.

This is the type of ID theft service you need. A complete wall of protection.

Again, back to time. I would rather sign one form and have a professional do the work for me. In fact if you knew the team of experts were hired by the Kuwaiti Gov’t to find Saddam Husseins assets, or hired to protect the Pope, or hired to run Enron, the number one financial forensic experts in the nation and risk consulting management company doing the homework for you to restore your Identity and in partnership with another 34 year old NYSE to help with the legal issues that you would need, how comfortable would you feel now? All for less than a bottle of water a day.

Oh yeah, the other services don’t even mention the legal consultation you would also need if you become a victim from the other forms of ID theft. Try calling that big social security number company when your sitting in jail for criminal ID theft on Christmas Day or after working hours. All these other services only talk about financial ID theft and leave out the whole picture.

So what type of service do you want your clients to have from the fire dept?

Dorothy