How military personnel should fight against identity theft?

If you are serving in the military, you may be deployed in places where you may have limited access to your personal finances.  You may not be able to check regularly your mails, your account balances and your credit report.  Identity thieves may take benefit of such situation.  They may use your identity for many fraudulent purposes like applying for a new credit in your name. After you come back and realize it, you may get a shock of your life.

To avoid such mishaps, you should take the following precautions –

You can request to your credit bureau for placement of an ‘active duty alert’ on your credit report. This means, if any new credit is applied in your name in your absence, the creditor needs to verify your details before granting any such credit.  Such alert is valid for one full year and you can request for its removal anytime.  If you are away for more than a year, you can request extension of this alert also.  This extension may be requested by your personal representative. Needless to say, you military ID should be safeguarded.  You should keep it with you all the times or in a secured place. You should not leave your credit cards with someone else.  Instead you can keep them in a secured place. While accessing your e-mails, you should not open e-mails which you feel suspicions or unsolicited.  In fact you should not access your emails from a public terminal as far as possible.  If you are required to do that, you should be careful to close all your accounts before you leave the place. You should not use obvious passwords like your date of birth or the maiden name of your mother or your social security number. While on duty, you should never give your personal information to anyone on phone.  This is especially true for your social security number. While you are away, your mail should not go on piling up in your mailbox.  Either you should request someone to collect it regularly or you should use a P.O. Box number to divert all your mail there. When you come back from your duty, you will check all your paper mail.  At that time, do not throw away paper statements or other documents without shredding them.  You should carefully look at the bank statements to find out whether there is any unknown purchase or unexpected withdrawal from your account.

Identity thieves are always on the lookout for military people as they are away from their residence for a lot of time and when they come back, they are not very particular about checking their credit card or bank account statements.  The crimes of identity theft have reached new heights in U.S. and you should not fall into the obvious traps of identity thieves.