Every day, the names, emails, passwords, home address, social security numbers, and family member information of millions of people are used to commit crimes. This guide can help you take proactive steps to protect your family.
Criminals use leaked and stolen information online to target people by:
• Applying for government benefits, such as unemployment
• Filing fraudulent tax returns
• Appling for loans with stolen information
• Using login credentials to access bank and consumer accounts
• Using data breach victim’s information to plan more effective email and phone scams, such as by targeting relatives and friends posing as you
Proactively finding and deleting your and your children’s personal data from data broker, credit reporting, and password exposure services can disrupt a key source of information that criminals use, making your family harder to target.
Data Breaches
A data breach happens when information belonging to a company or government organization is exposed to people who shouldn’t have access to it. When breaches affect your family, you might get a letter in the mail from the company that suffered the breach offering free identity monitoring services for a year or two. There are many legitimate companies that offer services to delete your personal information from the internet or make it harder to find.
However, there is also a free and proactive way to protect yourself and your children and reduce the risk that you will become the victim of scams and fraud. This short guide is designed to help Cook County residents understand this growing problem and take a few simple steps to protect themselves and their families. For each website in the list below, follow these 3 steps.
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Step1: Search for yourself. Click on your name |
Step 2. Copy the link to your information |
Step 3. Paste what you copied on the removal page |
Requesting removals of you and your child’s personal information online can be difficult and confusing.
Below are some of the major data broker websites. To limit your personal information online, visit each “where to check” site and search for yourself. Click on the result you’d like to remove, copy the URL, and then paste into the removal page.