ID Ledge

Heather Quinn

Editor of ID Ledge

About

I'm 45 and I work as an HR manager in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2022, two things happened in the span of about eight weeks that changed what I pay attention to.

First: my father, who is 72 and trusts the phone more than he should, got taken by a fake IRS call. He sent almost five thousand dollars in gift cards to someone he thought was a federal agent. By the time I understood what was happening, the cards were already used. The recovery process involved police reports, FTC filings, and a lot of phone calls that went nowhere, because there is no real recovery from gift card fraud. You learn that quickly.

Second: about two months after that, my own credit card got skimmed at a gas pump. I found out when I got a purchase notification for over a thousand dollars of online furniture I hadn't ordered. That one was easier to reverse, but the process of figuring out which bureau had what information and what to freeze and when took time I didn't budget for.

After that I started testing identity protection services. Not just subscribing and forgetting about them the way most people do, but actually paying attention to what they alert on, how fast they respond, and whether the "resolution support" they advertise is useful or just a customer service number. I keep a binder of paperwork from both of those incidents and from the monitoring and testing I've done since. The FTC IdentityTheft.gov forms actually come in handy. I reference them more than I expected to.

Nothing here comes from cybersecurity training or a professional background in fraud investigation. I'm an HR manager who learned about this stuff from personal experience, bills I didn't order, and a lot of time on hold.

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Disclosure

Some outbound links on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up for a service through one of them, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend services I have paid for and tested myself. If something performed poorly or had a misleading sales pitch, the review says so.