Hoosiers, or residents in the state of Indiana, have a new tool to help fight identity theft. An identity theft resource posted by the Indiana State Attorney General’s office, provides a simple dashboard for keeping track of all the information you will need in case your purse or wallet is stolen. Although this is not a complete resource for addressing every type of identity theft, this is a great way to start taking care of the problem as soon as it happens.
Consumers will find this a very easy site to use. By simply creating a user ID and password, you can immediately login to the Identity Theft Prevention Toolkit and get going. The site provides a user-friendly interface to log all the information about the contents of your purse or wallet, including phone numbers to get in touch with the various financial institutions, banks, credit card companies, etc. That you will want to talk to if your information is compromised. You can also access your free credit report from this site, as well as place a credit freeze or fraud alert on your credit accounts from any computer or cell phone that has access to the Internet.
More importantly there is a simple contact log that walks you through the initial phase of recovery. All the important information is on a single page about the police department contact as well as the State Attorney General’s Identity Theft Unit contact. Each contact record has the correct phone number for the Federal Trade Commission, Attorney General’s office, and the fraud department of all three credit reporting agencies. There is even a place to save the information about contact with your local police department, including the name of person that you talked with and the report number.
The Attorney General has be even carried it a step further, providing information on how to contact your local post office, the social security administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and several other organizations you will want to talk with if you are a victim of identity theft.
It’s easy to believe state governments across the country will adopt similar programs. In fact, such programs may already be out there, this is just the first one your Guide has seen. It does stand to the benefit of each state’s local Atty. General office to provide a resource to help identity theft victims quickly and efficiently, and a prevention trial kit like this is really a no brainer. The only expand buts the state will incur will be the additional storage possibly bandwidth as people become familiar with the program. However, by empowering consumers to take charge of their identity theft issues and providing them tools to quickly respond to an identity theft event, this will stem the flow of calls to prove the Atty. General’s office and various other state organizations that may hear from an identity theft victim but have no ability to fix the problem.
Of course, no system is perfect. The Identity Theft Prevention Toolkit addresses financial identity theft heavily, and touches on some of the other types as well, specifically Social Security identity theft and driver’s license identity theft. But medical activity theft, and insurance identity theft, both of which are closely related, seem to have been overlooked. This may have a lot to do with the fact that resolving these problems is far more complicated and time consuming.
Something else the average consumer will notice is that the Identity Theft Contact Log contained on the site only allows contact with specific organizations. There does not seem to be any way to add organizations that you feel you should contact beyond their recommendations.
Obviously this will be a work in progress. Taking the toolkit for a test drive, your Guide found that adding contacts in the Account Information section was simple enough (although it was required to have a physical address for every contact – which had to be looked up before the record can be saved), however there is no means for removing an account. This means you may end up with old information that is no longer relevant as time goes along.
However, your guide has to give credit where credit is due. The Indiana Attorney General’s office has taken a positive step in the right direction to help consumers address identity theft issues, and this is never a bad thing.
