Week 4: How to keep your identity safe

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If you’ve been lucky enough to a) have good credit and b) keep that credit out of the hands of identity thieves until this point, it might feel like your good fortune will last forever.

Bad news about that.?

According to its annual fraud report, the Federal Trade Commission received 1.1 million identity theft reports in 2022. We’ll wait and see the data for 2023, but anyone who’s been on the internet lately knows thieves are only getting smarter and scams are only getting sneakier (AI, anyone?).?

Having some degree of identity theft protection is smart, but you don't have to pay for it. Many features offered by identity theft protection services are free, such as credit monitoring, fraud alerts for credit card and bank accounts, and security tools like password management.

However, if you aren’t one of the lucky ones mentioned above and your identity has been stolen before, you're more likely to be targeted again. You may need to arm yourself more heavily than you would otherwise with features like dark web monitoring, public records monitoring, and identity theft recovery.

Your challenge:?

Take a look through Business Insider ’s picks for the best identity protection services to see if there are any that meet your needs — or the needs of your kids or elderly parents, whose identities are also at risk.

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