Identity Theft can be devastating, for anyone’s personal finances. Simply put, Identity theft occurs when some of your personal information has been obtained by some third party - who then uses it to obtain credit in your name. Sometimes the culprit goes farther than that, and commits all sorts of criminal acts in your name by using your personal information. And you are responsible for it all.

Imagine trying to get a loan for a house or a car, and finding that you have been rejected - your credit score is too low, and you have too many open accounts! How is this possible? That pre-approved credit application you threw away a few months back might be the culprit. You might discover that a dozen cards have been opened in your name, all of them overdue and maxed out. Your credit future is destroyed. It really isn’t as simple as calling a credit card company and telling them you didn’t open the account. As far as they know, the account was opened by you - they have no reason to believe otherwise. And considering they may have lent thousands of dollars to someone they believed to be you, they aren’t likely to simply forgive the debt. They want someone to pay for it, and you are as good a person as any.

You may even start to receive calls from debt collectors, daily calls demanding that you pay your account in full. You can try to tell them that the charges were not authorized, and you may even convince some of them - but the calls will continue as the debt is passed around to different owners. In the meantime, you can forget about getting any kind of credit. If the credit companies won’t forgive the debt, they aren’t going to remove the negative marks on your credit record. So when you actually need credit for yourself - be it something as small as a department store charge account, or something as large as a house - you will not be able to. Even in the easiest cases, identity theft can take years to unravel, and costs thousands of dollars to rectify. Protect yourself!