Numerous data breaches have occurred over the past few years. From the Target data breach to electronic health records being tapped into, consumers are at risk for identity theft like never before. Unfortunately, most are completely unaware of it. Many even assume that credit monitoring is enough to protect themselves from identity theft.

In fact, Target and other companies tried to calm the waters by offering free credit monitoring to identity theft victims after the attacks. But this is just a Band-Aid on the problem—and mostly a public relations ploy. Credit monitoring doesn’t provide even close to adequate protection. If you’re only relying on credit monitoring as a ways to prevent identity theft, you’ve given yourself a false sense of security. It’s scary, but true.

The Facts

It is estimated that over 4.6 million California residents have been affected by healthcare data breaches since 2009. Nationally, it is estimated that over 32 million U.S. residents have been affected. In July of 2014, an IRS worker was charged with identity theft, and contributed to over $1.2 million in fraudulent charges using information he obtained while working for the IRS. It’s said that 39 percent of data breach victims will have to deal with identity theft at some point. That means spending an average of 600 hours to recover their identity. With the growing number of data breaches occurring in the U.S., it’s time to take steps to protect yourself and your family.

Why Credit Monitoring Is Not Enough

Credit monitoring works just like it sounds: it just monitors. It doesn’t take action or provide ways to prevent identity theft from occurring. In fact, it only notifies you once identity theft has been discovered. After it happens, credit monitoring can’t help you recover from any type of identity theft.

Credit monitoring is only effective when someone uses your information to apply for a new bank account, credit card, or other account. But it doesn’t do anything to protect you during a data breach. When a data breach happens, the thieves have all of your personal information—including your credit card data—they can use to make expensive purchases. Your credit monitoring will never see the actual charges. And most credit monitoring services only monitor credit bureau reports, which means they could take weeks to find out fraud has occurred in the first place. It’s an ineffective system, to say the least.

The Right Ways to Prevent Identity Theft

Fortunately, there’s one identity theft protection company that offers a full-service product. It not only educates you in all the ways to monitor your credit and identity, but also provides law enforcement grade, fully managed recovery of your identity. It allows you to continue living your life instead of spending countless hours trying to fix it yourself.

Very few identity theft protection companies offer these turnkey services. By signing up with a service that does, you can:

• Have peace of mind in knowing your identity is fully protected—not just monitored
• Know what is on your credit report and public records the second they are posted
• Save out-of-pocket costs on recovering your identity when the theft occurs
• Have access to identity theft experts 24/7
• Ensure your identity is restored to pre-theft status

The Identity Advocate works exclusively with an identity theft protection company known as ID360. The comprehensive service provides numerous ways to prevent identity theft, and is unlike any other on the market. To learn more about ID360 and see how it protects your identity, visit The Identity Advocate for a special offer today. You simply can’t risk becoming yet another victim of a data breach and the resulting theft. Remember: it’s not a matter of if. It’s when. 

A child’s Social Security number and identity can be stolen just as easily as an adult’s. Thieves use their SSNs to open up bank accounts, apply for government benefits, and even rent a place to live. As a parent, it’s important that you are proactive in not only protecting your own identity, but the identity of your children, too.

Recent research has shown that over 10.2 percent of children in the United States have had their identity stolen. Therefore, it is imperative that parents take precautions to protect their kids’ identities. Child identity theft results in:

• A poor credit score
• Higher interest rates and more difficulty being approved for loans/credit in the future
• Medical identity theft when medical records show they are using medications that identity thieves are actually taking
• Difficulty fixing errors, especially when they are years (or even decades) old

How to Spot Child Identity Theft

There are many ways to find out if your child’s identity has been stolen. If you notice these red flags, take action immediately. Some signs your child’s identity has been used fraudulently include, but are not limited to:

• Your child begins receiving pre-approved credit card notices or financial offers in the mail
• Your child already has a bank account open in his/her name
• A child’s application for a bank account is denied because of poor credit
• A credit report is already opened for your minor child

Risks For Child Identity Theft

Children are at high risk for identity theft because thieves thrive on the fact that most parents are not proactive at checking up on or protecting their child’s identity. Also, children are required to submit their Social Security number to physicians and even schools, which means there are multiple records with their personal information out there.

How to Prevent Identity Theft For Your Child

While there is no 100 percent guarantee you can protect your child’s identity, there are things you can do to limit the chances that they become a victim of identity theft in the future. Some things you can do to prevent child identity theft include:

• Sign up for an identity theft protection plan with a company like ID360, the only one that offers fully managed law enforcement grade recovery. ID360 will save you the extensive time and hassle it takes to contact the FTC, credit bureaus, banks, and other entities to begin the recovery process—leaving you free to live your life.
• Limit the availability of your child’s Social Security number. Be mindful of who asks for it, ask why it is being required, and how it is stored. For example, what happens to your child’s Social Security number after you provide it to a recreation center?
• Always keep your child’s personal documents safe, which includes prescription information, birth certificates, Social Security cards, and more.
• Check your child’s credit report annually to ensure that his or her Social Security number is not being used fraudulently.
• Be aware of family members and family friends who could steal your child’s identity. It sounds unconscionable, but there are countless examples of child identity theft occurring by people who are close to the family. For example, family members with poor credit history may see your child’s perfect credit as an easy way to get back on their feet.

To learn more about how you can avoid child identity theft, visit the identity theft prevention experts at The Identity Advocate. By taking steps to protect your child’s identity, you can ensure they have a long, healthy credit history.

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You trust in your physician to take care of you. You trust them to prescribe medications, diagnose symptoms when you’re sick, and help you maintain a healthy lifestyle. But is your physician doing something else—something nefarious—that you don’t know about? He or she could be committing healthcare fraud—at your expense!

Healthcare fraud and abuse is on the rise in the United States. From physicians billing for services you don’t receive to performing unnecessary procedures, healthcare fraud and abuse takes a serious toll on your health and insurance. While most physicians do it to pad their revenue, these false claims, medical orders, and prescriptions put your life at risk.

Billing Schemes

Physician billing schemes are one of the most common types of healthcare fraud and abuse. He or she will bill your health insurance for services that were never provided and collect reimbursements for those services. This can occur in many ways, from a chiropractor billing your insurance for five visits when you only visited twice, to a physician charging you for expensive medications (like those used to treat kidney disease, cancer, or HIV) that you don’t need or didn’t receive.

Physicians have also been known to offer in-house CT machines and bill your insurance for scans that were never scheduled, let alone performed. Or a physician may perform a procedure to add a stent you don’t really need just to be able to bill your insurance and collect a claim. All of these extra charges and expensive services can impact both your insurance premiums and your health. The list of offenses goes on and on.

Upcoding For Higher Claim Amounts

Upcoding is another common form of healthcare fraud and abuse. This is a process where the physician charges for a higher service than what was actually performed. For example, you visit your physician for a routine office visit, which has its own code and reimbursement amount. However, your physician charges your insurance for an extended office visit, which costs more. According to recent statistics, making a simple code change like this could increase a physician’s revenue by $70,000. While his or income is increasing, yours is declining as you watch your insurance premiums steadily rise.

How to Fight Healthcare Fraud and Abuse

As frightening as all of this is, you can take steps to protect yourself:

• Review your billing statements and explanation of benefits (EOB) from your insurance provider. Verify that the charges made by your physician coincide with services, medications, and equipment you actually received. If you are confused, or feel you did not receive services, call the physician immediately!
• Annually request all treatment paid for by your insurance carrier. Compare them to your EOBs. If you find discrepancies, notify your carrier immediately.
• Request receipts when you pay at your physician’s office, as well as a receipt of all services performed.
• If you choose to pay cash for a service, watch for an EOB that the provider also charged your insurance provider.

Despite all you do to fight back against healthcare fraud and abuse, 10 to 30 percent of all medical patients fall victim. Get extra protection by hiring a fraud and abuse expert that specializes in safeguarding you from the consequences of these types of physician practices. Whatever you do, be proactive to prevent it from happening to you.

Make the Right Move

Consider signing up for an identity theft protection plan with a company like ID360, the only one managed by law enforcement that also restores your identity back to pre-theft status after it’s stolen. You can also discover helpful resources over at The Identity Advocate, and contact an experienced investigator to learn more about resolving healthcare fraud and identity theft. Fight back!

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Albany Medical Center was working hard to take care of its patients and bring a higher level of healthcare to the community. According to most patients, the facility was doing a good job of it. Unfortunately, the medical center’s reputation was recently damaged when one of its own nurses was caught stealing patient identities.

With the help of her boyfriend, a nurse stole over 50 patient identities and applied for hundreds of credit cards in their names. The two identity thieves were eventually caught red-handed with a collection of patients’ names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, credit cards, and gift cards.

Sadly, this is just one of numerous cases in which nurses swiped patient identities for personal financial gain. As a medical facility or administrator, it’s your duty to protect your patients from identity theft. After all, more importantly than harming your reputation as a trusted healthcare provider, medical identity theft puts your patients’ lives at risk. Here’s how to safeguard your facility.

Be Strict About Hiring

Implement well-defined hiring practices to weed out potential threats. For example, run extensive background checks on each applicant to make sure there is no history of criminal activity or association with criminals. Also, only hire personnel that can show their qualifications and have a long list of references—references you actually check up on as well. Reference checks are important for every position, but especially for the nurses who will have regular interaction with patients and their private information.

Stick to Regulations

Your patients are at risk every time employees don’t explicitly follow established protocols and federal privacy regulations. This, of course, includes adhering to the rules governing protected health information under HIPAA. Patient records are a goldmine for identity thieves. They contain all of the information they need to easily commit medical identity theft—names, addresses, birthdates, and Social Security numbers. Patient files may even include credit card information for billing purposes. Make sure you follow all of HIPAA’s strict guidelines for how patient information should be handled to reduce the likelihood of that data falling into the wrong hands.

Implement Control Systems

Set up control systems to eliminate opportunities for medical identity theft to occur at your facility. This includes considering both human and electronic security measures. Create an extensive set of policies and procedures that safeguard patients’ personal information:

• Hire an identity theft protection company that specializes in not only preventing medical identity theft from happening in the first place, but also recovering patient identities after they’re stolen.
• Develop a secure IT network that only allows authorized users to access patient records. Require complex passwords to login to the network, and only share them with those employees who need access.
• Configure computer systems containing patient records to automatically logout a user when a workstation is unattended.
• Add security screens to computers in public areas.
• Hold all members of your staff accountable for complying with HIPAA laws.
• Require staff to participate in annual competency training to keep their patient privacy skills up-to-date.
• Never leave patient records unattended in unsecured areas.
• Regularly shred and securely dispose of printed patient records.
• Audit your system regularly to see which records have been accessed and by whom. If you notice patient records have been accessed after hours or have been accessed repeatedly, call those employees in to question.
• If resources allow for it, hire a full-time privacy and security officer responsible for monitoring, tracking, and protecting patient privacy.

Prevent Medical Identity Theft

If your system is breached and patient identities are stolen, hire a professional identity theft investigator to run the investigation. They stay current on all of the latest medical identity theft methods, and use techniques to quickly find the identity thieves. The last thing you want to do is let the identity theft drag on, putting more patients in harm’s way.

Ultimately, as a reputable medical facility, you have a responsibility to keep your patients’ identities under lock and key. Failure to do so not only threatens patients’ health and finances. Identity theft also has far-reaching legal and financial implications that can put you out of business.

Don’t let identity thieves—whether employees or people outside the organization—wreak havoc in your medical facility. Visit The Identity Advocate for more tips and to learn how to set up a medical identity theft protection plan for your business.

Many of us use medical devices to monitor a variety of health issues—everything from sleep apnea to heart conditions—to help keep us safe and sound. What many of us don’t realize is that these devices make us more vulnerable to medical identity theft and healthcare fraud.

Unfortunately, unlike regular forms of identity theft, a medical data breach can have life-threatening consequences. Ironically, the same device that can save a life can also be used by an identity thief to put someone’s life at risk.

So while medical device technology continues to drive innovations in the healthcare industry, we need to be vigilant to prevent identity theft at every turn. Identity thieves are resourceful and just as innovative with their techniques—often striking before the industry has had time to catch up with new security measures.

Identity Thieves Have Their Eye on Healthcare

Personal information is the lifeblood of an identity thief, and nothing could be more personal than your medical information. After all, your medical records can contain even more sensitive information than your financial records, making them prime targets for identity thieves. In fact, while someone’s credit card records sell for about $2.00 on the black market, medical records sell for an average of $20.00. With these financial incentives, it’s no surprise that medical identity theft is on the rise, claiming 1.84 million victims in the U.S. in 2013.

The Risks of Medical Identity Theft

Medical identity theft occurs when thieves use your personal information and your health insurance to receive medical services. They may have prescriptions filled under your name or attempt to fraudulently bill your health insurance provider to receive a refund. And since they are impersonating you when they receive every medical procedure and prescription, this information is recorded on your own medical history. You’re on the hook both financially and medically, and the results can be disastrous.

Consider, for example, that you have an allergic reaction to a medication. Your allergy has been well-documented in your records so physicians know to avoid it. However, if you suddenly find yourself in a medical emergency and doctors are looking at someone else’s records, they may very well give you medication that could make a bad situation worse.

How Your Medical Devices Put You in Danger

Medical monitoring devices such as insulin pumps, implanted defibrillators, CPAP machines (used for sleep apnea), medical alert devices, and even baby monitors could put you at higher risk for medical identity theft. This is because these devices connect to hospital networks, home health networks, smartphones, wireless connections, and other sources. As they attempt to transmit over these connections, a skilled hacker can intercept the data and access a medical device—and any history or personal information associated with it.

What You Can Do to Protect Yourself

If you have a medical device, speak with the manufacturer and/or physician that issued it. Find out what measures they are taking to protect your medical information, and how they safeguard the networks that are connected to your device. What are their data encryption standards? What about password protection protocols? How do they respond to a data breach? If they can’t answer these questions, you should consider switching companies and/or doctors.

With threats only expected to grow as we see more advances in healthcare technology, it’s critical that you take a proactive approach to prevent your medical identity from being stolen. Consider signing up for an identity theft protection plan with a company like ID Theft Solutions, the only one managed by law enforcement that restores your identity back to pre-theft status.

As always, you can also connect with us here at The Identity Advocate to learn more about medical identity theft, and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to have identity theft prevention tips delivered to your inbox every month.

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In the wake of the recent Target data breach, in which identity thieves gained access to the personal information of at least 70 million customers, the company announced it would offer free credit monitoring for a year. While this is a good first step for the retail giant, it gives affected customers false hope.

At face value, credit monitoring seems like an attractive service. After all, it helps detect suspicious activity on your credit report and gives you a heads-up about potential problems. But many credit monitoring companies market their service as being an identity theft protection plan. This simply isn’t the case.

The reality is that credit monitoring is just what it says it is: monitoring. It doesn’t prevent identity theft or your credit from being hijacked. Considering the fact that one in four data breach notification recipients become a victim of identity theft, simply monitoring these attacks isn’t enough. You need to proactively take steps to protect both your credit and your identity.

Credit Monitoring Gives a False Sense of Security

Credit monitoring services alert you when any type of new account appears on your credit report. Unfortunately, by this time the identity theft has often already happened. Credit monitoring didn’t prevent the theft; it simply notified you of the fraudulent activity so you could start the long process of trying to repair your credit.

Look at credit monitoring as being only a small part of a comprehensive identity theft protection plan. Keep in mind that, although you’re alerted when changes occur on your credit report, some events may go unnoticed or even be reported incorrectly. Many consumers don’t discover that their identity has been stolen until debt collectors show up at the door.

The same goes for three-in-one services that offer to monitor all three credit reporting bureaus. These methods aren’t secure because an identity thief can still open accounts in your name without actually having your credit report pulled. There is also an extensive delay between when an account is opened and when it shows up on your credit report. By the time you’re notified, the identity thief could have dozens of accounts already opened and racking up debt.

Tips for Preventing Identity Theft

You need an identity theft protection plan to keep thieves from using your information in the first place. A few tips:

• Be proactive and sign-up for identity theft protection with ID Theft Solutions, the only company managed by law enforcement that restores your identity back to pre-theft status.
• Be cautious of the websites you visit and the Internet connections you use to access them. Public networks aren’t secure and identity thieves can easily gain access to your computer, email accounts, and bank accounts.
• Never share personal information via email, over the phone, or with anyone you don’t know well. Identity thieves like to impersonate customer service representatives and ask to verify your birthday, Social Security number, or other personal data. If you’re not expecting contact, hang up and call the company back at a phone number you can trust.
• Lock up your financial and medical information, and shred documents you no longer need.
• Implement a credit freeze and check your credit card statements at least once a month for suspicious activity. You can also sign up with CreditKarma.com to check your credit score and also receive monthly monitoring for free—without your credit being affected in any way.
• Add a fraud alert to your credit report if you suspect you’re at risk for fraud (such as using a debit or credit card during the Target data breach debacle).

Whatever you do, don’t just depend on credit monitoring as your identity theft protection plan. With one new victim every three seconds, identity theft is a growing problem that shows no signs of letting up. Visit The Identity Advocate to start safeguarding your identity today, and don’t forget to join our mailing list to have identity theft prevention tips delivered to your inbox each month.