Identity theft is a crime. The crime occurs when someone invades your life, taking pieces of your personal identifying information and assumes it as his/her own, thereby causing damage to your credit, as well as your name. This rather broad topic takes in any number of privacy crimes, including theft of a Social Security number, credit card number, debit card, phone card or other illegal assumption of or obtaining false credit in your name.
Typically, Identity Thieves are looking for a quick fix - the opportunity to buy merchandise or obtain cash without being identified. This generally entails using your identity and/or existing credit to purchase a good that they can sell for cash or to obtain services such as car rental, etc.
Farmers State Bank wants to do our part in helping protect our customers from this growing problem. Therefore, we are offering ID TheftSmart, a Credit Monitoring and Identity Theft Protection service.
The ID TheftSmart service allows consumers to identify inaccuracies in credit data being reported by creditors. It also offers consumers early detection of potentially fraudulent activity in their credit file. In addition, consumers have access to trained credit specialists to answer any data questions over the phone on their monitoring report. The credit specialists act on the behalf of the consumer and can submit disputes to credit reporting agencies. ID TheftSmart can save valuable time and the frustration that can follow.
Ideally, you should order a credit report as a base line and then subscribe to credit monitoring to stay up-to-date on activity in your file.
Credit Specialists are available 9-5pm, central time Monday–Friday, excluding holidays.
Requests for credit monitoring and delivery of monitoring alerts are available online (via the internet), and offline (via postal delivery). For online delivery, alerts are provided on a daily basis from the reporting agency. Notification of no activity is delivered on a monthly basis. For offline delivery, alerts are provided on a monthly basis. For offline delivery, quarterly “no-hits” letters are provided for consumers that have no activity to report.
Feel free to come in and visit with any of our staff in Parkston, Mitchell, Kaylor or Fulton for more information or to get signed up. Don’t let yourself become another statistic…come see us and find out how you can protect your identity with our Credit Monitoring and Identity Theft Protection service, ID TheftSmart!