The following is a list of things to do if you find out that someone is trying to use your identity to open credit cards or for other nefarious deeds.
I recently had a situation with a friend and have created this list. I wanted to share this information so that if anyone else finds themselves in this situation, they have a game plan of what actions they can take to mitigate the damage that can be caused.
Monitor Your Credit!
The most important thing that you can do is to monitor your credit. You can set up alerts for when new inquiries happen, and I highly recommend doing this, even before any of your sensitive information is out there. This step helps you catch this early, before much damage has been done. I have Credit Karma and bureaus, which work well and are close to instant.
Another step that should be done when you find your information public, but I also recommend just doing this as a general rule, is to freeze your credit file. This can be done at all three of the major bureaus. There is also a smaller credit bureau called Innovis that you can freeze.
While you are on the credit bureaus website, on one of them, you should submit a fraud alert. This only needs to be done on one of the bureaus, and they will report this to the others.
I can get all my information through the credit agencies. I do recommend using AnnualCreditReport.com. The US government funds this site to give consumers access to their credit reports. I would review this and ensure there are no new or overlooked accounts. At this point, if you have been compromised, I would make looking over this a regular habit. You can look at the reports on this web page once a year.
Create a record.
Next, I would report the identity theft on https://www.identitytheft.gov/. This will help you dispute any fraudulent accounts if any are opened.
Lock down your tax refund.
If your SSN were stolen/compromised, I would visit the IRS website to create a PIN. This is going to prevent tax refund fraud. https://www.irs.gov/identity-theft-fraud-scams/get-an-identity-protection-pin
Practice good financial hygiene.
One more recommendation is checking all your accounts and even setting up alerts for transactions. I cannot make a perfect recommendation for everyone. I have all my accounts set to alert on every transaction. I believe this is something everybody should be doing anyway, regardless of identity theft status.
Practice good security.
Make sure you change your passwords, and please do not use the same password for every service. I would actually just use a password manager and create a unique password for every site that you have an account on.
Protect against fraudulent bank accounts.
Another thing that you can do is to put a freeze on Chex Systems. https://www.chexsystems.com. You will have to make an account, but there are not many options, and this should be pretty easy to find.
I will continue to update this list as I learn more, and if anyone has further recommendations, please let me know! If you need to get your mind off your troubles, check out my guide on setting up a Proxmox game server.