It’s become a major industry to steal people’s identities. By impersonating you, these thieves use it to obtain credit (destroying your credit in the meantime) and to empty your bank accounts. What can you do to stop them?
It’s not clear who’s worse, the people filling out credit card applications after stealing your identity or the credit card companies themselves. At least there is some chance the identity thieves will go to jail after taking over your credit, while the credit card companies enrich themselves legally with hidden fees and exorbitant interest rates. My wife and I signed up for American Express Blue Cash, thinking that we’d be making 5% back on some of our purchases, and intially we did, but not for long.
Avoiding bad deals is an important part of maintaining your financial health. It’s shocking to hear from friends how they have been preyed upon by high pressure sales people that sell anything from time share condos to home furnishings. Fortunately, you can detect these sales creatures by the tactics they have in common:
It’s not a new form of applied science, rather a new name for an old profession - conning people out of their hard earned money. From hard experience, understanding scams is part of careful financial planning — both my wife and I were both taken at a young age. The lastest scams are ingenious in their use of modern technology.
