Shore Up Your Identity-Theft Safeguards

It's scary to imagine someone stealing your credit cards and ruining your credit history. But it's even scarier to consider someone assuming your entire identity by taking your Social Security number and creating a completely different persona.

Maybe it's an illegal alien who has purchased your Social Security number. Maybe it's a fraudster who slightly changed your Social Security number to open new accounts, knowing that credit bureau software is likely to assume that the switched digits are a typing mistake. So new credit is authorized in your name -- at a fraudulent address.

Or maybe your identity hasn't been intentionally stolen, but the misdeeds of someone who shares your name are mistakenly reported in your file when a prospective employer does a background search.

How would you ever know? Even if you have a credit monitoring service, it won't report on different names using your Social Security number, and it won't check criminal records or other public records under your name. Thousands of Americans could share your name. And all of them can be confused with you in public records.

That's the impetus behind two new products that give you, the consumer, a peek at where and how your name and Social Security number show up in public records of more than 9,000 databases around the country.