Recently I was the victim of identity theft, it is a big hassle and quite frankly frightening when you find out this has been done to you. Then the anger sets in, along with the frustration of trying to prove to all of the stores that you were not the one who made the purchases. Luckily for me my wife and I just happened to go to the bank 3 days after it happen and when we were told that we were in overdraft on our account, both of our jaws almost hit the floor, because we knew that there was a mistake somewhere.

The bank quickly pulled up 3 checks in question, and printed out copies of them. Clearly they were frauds, we have a joint account and only my name was on them, plus all 3 checks signatures were different and not the way I sign. Not to mention I never write checks, my wife is the only one who does and we only use checks for bills and not purchases.

We quickly reported to all of the authorities about the bogus checks, and were dumbfounded how this could have happened, beings we have not lost anything of importance for the thieves to have gotten such sensitive information. All of the money that we lost was returned to our account within 7 business days, but the process of trying to prove to the stores where the checks were written that we were not the ones who did it, began.

I have successfully taken care of 2 of the 3 checks, but one more just seems to keep popping back up and the store telling us that they are reporting us to collections for the payment, even after I have filled out the fraud forms that they have sent me. This is a huge problem in America, and believe it or not is for the seventh year in a row, is at the top of the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint list, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,354 complaints received between January 1 and December 31, 2006.

There are services out there that are very cheap and will save you all of the troubles that I had to go through and are still going through. One of the biggest and most popular today is lifelock.

The service is only $110 for a year’s membership and guarantees up to a million dollars in losses. They have a seven step process that they take with each customer to help prevent identity theft, including credit bureaus to set free fraud alerts, request that your name be removed from pre-approved credit card and junk mail lists which is a common way that thieves commit fraud, and ongoing identity monitoring.

From those of us who have only a small savings to those of you that have a considerable amount of assets lifelock can make a big difference should you be the victims of identity theft, don’t be like me and think that it could never happen to me… because that’s just what happened. I am now protected and I urge all of you who are concerned about identity theft to take action in securing your good name. Take Care all!