protect your identity

A reporter from the local paper, the Wilmington News Journal, was recently the victim of identity theft. He describes his experience in a painful blow-by-blow description of the fight to reclaim his name. The article's sidebar has some good suggestions on how you can help protect your identity. He also wrote a companion piece on efforts to make it more difficult for people to appropriate social security numbers and other vulnerable information.

While there is some very useful information in the News Journal articles on identity theft, sometimes you just have to wonder about how fragile the whole credit reporting system is. Especially when you read about a woman who is fighting the credit agencies to prove to them that she is not dead, as their records indicate.