Top 5 Tips to Prevent Credit Card Fraud

If you are worried about credit card fraud you are well on your way to protecting yourself from being a victim. The truth is anyone can easily be a victim of fraud because of the careless ways we handle our personal information. Here are the top 5 ways you can avoid becoming a fraud victim.

Never give solicited personal information to a stranger

We always tell our children never to speak to strangers. Yet when someone calls and talks to us in a friendly way, most of us will be glad to give out any information the caller requests. In order to avoid letting your personal information be used against you, never provide vital information about yourself to anyone that you do not fully trust. In other words, do not give your social security number, your driver’s license, your full address, your credit card number or any combination of the above to a stranger.

Do not share unsecured personal information over the Internet

During the early days when the Internet was young and most users were naive, junk mail was one of the easiest ways to obtain personal information from unknowing surfers. False promises of a lottery win or a special prize can easily convince surfers to part with their private information for something trifling or nothing at all. Whilst most of us have better common sense nowadays, you should still never provide any form of personal information to anyone over the Net, especially your credit card details.

Beware of Phishing sites

Phishing is a term related to websites that were made to mimic real websites (like those of online banking sites) with the sole purpose of getting information from you. A mail will be sent to you informing you of a need to access your online credit card account for certain transactions. The mail will contain a link, with a page that looks like it will connect you to your account site. In reality, this page links to a Phishing site, which functions to collect your personal information illegally. Finally, your details will be utilized by these criminals for online shopping, or even for credit card duplication purposes.

Check your monthly statements

It could be months before you discover that someone else has been using your credit card without your knowledge if you do not regularly check your monthly statements. As you know your spending patterns, you will definitely be able to sniff out something fishy when your outstanding totals jumps a grand or two. Provided that you don’t have family members with uncontrollable spending needs, it is a definite way of knowing that someone has been using your card illegally.

Protect your mail

Most of us take our mail for granted. We don’t usually lock our mailboxes when in fact, we should. Our mail contains much of our personal information, especially mail that comes from banks, insurance companies and credit card companies. If anyone were to steal any of your mail which contains your personal information, you would have lost your identity to these thieves even before you got your morning mail.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
« End Debt with Oprahs Debt Diet
Try a 50-year mortgage »

Leave a Reply

Sponsors

Tags

How Credit Scores Affect Mortgage Applications

With a good credit score an applicant will receive prompt response from many lenders, all of them offering low interest rates and low down payment options. The loan amount offered also may be high. On the contrary a low credit score would result in a lot of rejection from various mortgage financers. Because creditors wouldn’t come forward easily to give credit to individuals that have a history of difficulty in repaying existing loans. After all, creditors take risk when they finance mortgages against the credit history of a debtor. Naturally, they will wish to remain on the safe side and pick up less risky ones that have good credit histories. A good credit score means less chance of missing on payments and therefore less risky.

But there are some real risk takers that will come forward to finance mortgages for individuals with bad credit scores. They would charge high down payments and always high interest rates though. They may also fix additional charges for every little paper work and may charge high closing rates. The loan amount offered will also be considerably less. The individual with poor credit scores will not have much choice but to accept the terms and conditions as there are no other alternatives. This is a tight situation and to avoid this you must have a good credit score.

People with bad credit may fall in to the trap of ’secured loans’. Secured loans are the ones where the loan applicant offers an asset as collateral security. The lender becomes secure about the repayment of the loan and not the borrower. Securing a loan with bad credit score becomes easy only when the applicant is willing to offer some asset as collateral security. This again is a very dangerous situation where an individual runs the risk of losing his entire collateral asset in case of failing to pay the loan installments in time. An individual should always avoid such type of a loan.

Resort properties normally require large amounts of finance which a person with bad credit may find it difficult to obtain. So it is always advisable to keep your credit score high. Incase the credit score becomes low due to unavoidable financial reasons it can be improved upon. There is no need to lose hope simply because a person has a low credit score. If the property that he intends to buy has good equity he should go out and try to obtain finances for it. There are many sub prime lenders willing to offer their services.

For a review of your credit report as it relates to a mortgage loan and a consultation on the best loans available to you, give us a confidential, no obligation and no cost call.