Advice RE identity theft.

[mgaut051]

My mother in law's email was hacked. It sent me a "please send money to London" email. It also sent it to my wife, my father and her bank (potentially among others.) I told her to change all her online passwords, her credit card pins, her debit pins, send an email to ALL her contacts, call her bank and perform a credit check and add a warning on her credit account.

Anything else I forgot?

 

[bagman67]

You forgot to add:


Track down the dirtbag slimeball responsible and force him to watch as you lower his severed genitalia into a Cuisinart.


But the rest sound good.

 

[dmraco]

I would Order new cards with new numbers.  A real pia but worth it.

 

[Cagey]

There are two schools of thought on passwords. Actually three, but one is just stupid.

First, one that 97% of the population will never get due to the woefully inadequate mathematical training in the public school system...

Second, and this alludes to the first in some degree but some systems force it on you, is to pick something that will never show up in any dictionary, is highly unlikely to be guessed and supposedly is reasonably secure is to pick a familiar phrase where you can use some caps and substitute some numbers for words to create something seemingly bizarre. For instance, "Your mother and I ate lunch together two times this week" may be easy to remember and translates to "YmaI8lt2ttw". A sufficiently obscure password for most uses.

The last method, which is used the most, is to pick birthdays, names, places, pets, etc. Those passwords seldom take any password cracker more than a millisecond to break.

 

[Jusatele]

change passwords weekly
but even this cannot help all the time
it only helps from the ones that doit easily

never use a cc or debit card for a gas transaction, number one place they hack is gas stations
do not use a Debit card if it is not a Major store, second biggest place hacked is mom and pop stores or small chains,they do not incript
do not store CC or Bank info on your computer you use to access online, third biggest way they get you
what ever you do, do not open any e mail you do not know who sent it

oh yea, cash rules, cards are just a way to be in misery.

I learn 3 years ago about identity theft, it is so easy these days because we trust technology.
Mine started when the wife gave a debit card to someone in a small store. in 2 hours 5300 dollars was gone from a bank account a 2 credit cards had been taken out in my name.

it is a very serious problem you have to get on quick.