Identity Protection Information

As a smart consumer, in addition to Identity Protection you should also understand how credit a report works.

A credit report has four main parts.

• Personal Information
• Trade-Lines
• Inquiries
• Public Records

Personal Information

The Personal Information part of the report contains the personal information of the subject.  This includes, the subject’s full name, current and past addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, and social security number.

This information is supplied directly from the subject’s credit applications.  This information is also used to verify the applicants identity.  It’s not uncommon for there to be errors in this information, since this information is generally entered by the lender’s staff and not directly by the applicant.  Misspellings, keystroke errors and reversing numbers in Social Security numbers are common.

The bureaus only require 3 of the above to both request a report and for credit trade-lines to be attached to a report. Since lender’s that request your report and report your history often omit some of the identifying items above, it is quite likely information attached to a report may not be for the actual subject.  The probability for errors increases exponentially when member’s of the same household have similar names.  So if you are Joe Consumer Junior.  It is highly likely that Joe Consumer Senior’s credit information will appear on your report and vice a versa.

Trade-Lines

The Trade-line section of the credit report is where the credit grantor or lender list the payment history and other terms of the credit.  Information like the the type of credit line, credit limit, the maximum amount ever outstanding on the line or original balance, the age of the account, and current balance.

When reviewing your credit report, any Trade-Line you do not recognize is a warning that you might be the victim of identity theft and identity protection measures should be enacted immediately.

Inqueries

In the inquiry section of the credit report anyone who accessed the credit report is listed.  This will include any lender that purchased the data or any potential lenders that viewed the report. This section is what credit monitoring services typically monitor.  They alert their customers each time a new entry appears.  This of course can be delayed several weeks.  Assuming the monitoring company reviews each customer’s report once a month, an fraudulent entry here might not be reported to the consumer for up to 59 days after the credit was accessed.  This of course gives the identity thief ample time to apply for credit and use the fraudulently obtained credit before the consumer ever knows the theft has occurred even if a credit monitoring service is employed for protection.

Public Records

In this section a list of any public records is displayed.  Items like bankruptcy filings and foreclosure proceedings would be shown here.  It’s important to note that while some public records contain social security numbers the vast majority do not.  Therefore if you have a common name it is very likely that public records not belonging to you will be listed in this section.