Tips on Avoiding Identity Theft
February 01 2017 - 2:32PM
Dow Jones News
By Peter Rudegeair
Identity fraud kept rising last year in the U.S., despite the
rollout of new security chips on U.S. credit cards.
A new study Wednesday reported that identity fraud hit 15.4
million U.S. consumers in 2016, the highest level in more than a
decade. To protect credit and debit cards and online bank accounts
from fraud, Javelin Strategy & Research, which co-wrote the
report with identity-theft protection firm LifeLock Inc.,
recommended consumers follow the following tips:
Sign up for transaction alerts. Growth in identity fraud was
driven by criminals buying goods and services online with stolen
card information, what's known in the industry as "card-not-present
fraud." By opting into email or smartphone alerts every time a
transaction is recorded on a card, customers will be able to detect
fraudulent activity more quickly, ideally preventing the follow-on
fraud that sometimes occurs in the days and weeks after the initial
breach.
Consider mobile wallets. Apple Inc's Apple Pay and Alphabet
Inc's Android Pay are among the mobile-payment options that don't
share a consumer's credit-card details with merchants when a
purchase is made. These services generate a unique token to
authorize a transaction, so if hackers breach a merchant's payment
system, they wouldn't be able to steal the underlying credit-card
data of mobile-wallet users.
Go private. Swindlers often comb through social media to get
clues to a consumer's personal information and use them to take
over accounts. Setting strong privacy controls and validating
accounts with obscure "challenge" questions instead of more-easily
tracked personal data should limit those kinds of fraud.
Write to Peter Rudegeair at Peter.Rudegeair@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 01, 2017 14:17 ET (19:17 GMT)
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