Tell me if you’ve ever had these thoughts: “I’m not going to get hacked,” or, “I don’t have anything a criminal would want”? You’re not alone in thinking these things, but unfortunately they are 100% not true.

That’s right, It’s time to dispel those myths, my cyber warriors! I invited Jessica to share her story with you today, because she learned the hard way that cyber criminals will take anything they can get.

Jessica was a victim of identity theft in 2014 after a data breach at a former employer. Through no fault of her own, her sensitive data was released out there in cyberspace. It came to her attention when she started to receive alerts from her credit monitoring company - accounts in her name were popping up all over the country. Even pharmacies she’d never been to were asking her to come pick up subscriptions.

Now - did you notice the part where Jessica had credit monitoring? Thank goodness she did, or she would not have known right away that this was happening! Immediately, she started to take steps to prevent it with an alert on her credit account.

Now here's another round of bad guys - sleazy credit issuers. They ignored the alert and continued to allow fraudulent accounts to be opened until Jessica eventually froze her credit altogether. Sadly, she ended up with her financial information in a gigantic mess that has taken years to clean up.

The moral of this story? This type of cyber crime can happen to anybody because your name, social security number, and credit identity is all a criminal needs to wreak havoc on your life.

The second moral of this story? Make sure you have good credit monitoring in place! Choose a product like our Identron, that checks all three credit bureaus and allows you to monitor your children’s credit as well. Imagine if this had gone on for years before Jessica even knew about it, yikes!

Even though she is still cleaning up her credit report, this story has an empowering ending. Jessica decided to switch careers and go into cybersecurity. This experience has made one thing clear: she wants to help prevent cyber crimes from happening to anyone else!

Takeaways from this episode:

1. Cyber crimes such as identify theft can happen to anyone, and criminals will cause a lot of damage with just your name and social security number.
2. Identity theft takes a lot of time and energy to recover from, it’s no joke.
3. Credit monitoring is a must-have! Look into a product like our Identron, that will let you know right away if anything suspicious is happening with your credit.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Report Identity Theft Online:

https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/report-identity-theft

Prezley Videos about how to protect your account while gaming:

https://www.youtube.com/c/PREZLEY/search?query=password

If you'd like to learn more about cybersecurity and online identity protection, you can connect with me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-mantilia/

To protect your company against cyber crime, you can now book me for cybersecurity training:

https://bit.ly/3CtZKzD

To keep your family protected online, learn more about our Identron Identity Theft Protection software:

http://bit.ly/Identron