Remain Vigilant of your Credit Report to Protect from Identity Theft

While there are many ways you can make sure that your identity is staying safe, one way that is both free and easy is to check your credit report each year. Since you receive a free credit report from each credit reporting agency each year, you can get a snapshot of your finances three times a year for free. This snapshot can also be an excellent chance to detect and rectify identity theft. The Equifax Finance Blog explains how to make the most of this in the new article, “The Facts About Credit Report Accuracy.”

When you search your credit report, there is a small chance that you may come across errors. Errors can come from many places, including mis-filings, incorrect data from lenders or credit card companies or from identity theft. Since the chances of mis-filing and incorrect data can be as low as 1.9 percent, if you order your credit report and find lots of errors, you may have caught an identity thief before too much damage gets done.

Checking your credit report is just one avenue of protection from identity theft. Another way is to sign up for a credit monitoring service like the ones offered by Equifax, where you can be protected, insured and alerted in case there is any fraudulent activity on your accounts.

To learn more about your credit report and how you can benefit from additional credit report and identity theft protection, check out Equifax.com.