You are immersed in caregiving—doctor appointments, transportation, communication—all the various activities that are so important. Now add in having to think about bad actors who want to take advantage of your vulnerable position to commit outright financial fraud. I mean, aren’t you doing enough already? Well, of course you are!
Unfortunately, there are people in the world who not only don’t care about your best interests, but who would abuse other people’s personal information if they get their hands on it.
These days data breaches are rampant, and personal data of all kinds are ending up in the wrong hands, through absolutely no fault of the victim. From healthcare providers to banks, many of the institutions that we depend on in our everyday lives are being breached. Therefore, everyone needs to protect their data at a personal level and not be complacent.
Sadly, the criminals even specifically target older persons, who often have good credit scores and assets.
So, what can you do proactively to prevent someone from scamming you or the person you are caring for? What can you do when that has happened and you are left dealing with the aftermath? Here are specific steps caregivers can take to prevent scams or fraud.
Accessing credit reporting
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a U.S. government agency that makes sure banks, lenders, and other financial companies treat you fairly. It maintains a very useful website covering virtually all aspects of consumer financial affairs. The website contains information about not only how to protect yourself, but also how to protect someone else.
We have talked about financial caregiving in another section on the website and emphasized the importance of having a financial power of attorney if you are acting on someone else’s behalf. Having a financial power of attorney is even more important when dealing with the aftermath of identity theft or fraud.
If you will be monitoring credit and dealing with fraud issues for someone else, consider using a secondary email address of your own or setting up an email address specifically for those transactions. If you use your main email address for your login, you’ll receive a lot of messages from these bureaus, entities and related services. It is a lot cleaner, and much less confusing, to use an email address other than your main email. You should be monitoring and freezing your own credit files, so will need to register with all the bureaus on your own behalf and will likely want to use your main email address for your own account.
Obtaining and reviewing a credit report
A credit report is part of the records of a person’s financial history. It usually includes at least credit payment history, loans, current debt, bankruptcy history, and lawsuit records. It also includes personal data like current and former addresses, phone numbers, and the name of the spouse. The data is submitted by banks, mortgage companies, and other institutions (more than you imagine); some of it is also simply scraped from the web.
What is in your credit report may or may not actually be correct. Sometimes information from someone with a similar name is entered, sometimes information is no longer correct, and sometimes you will find that someone has fraudulently gotten credit in your name. This is why it is important for you to access and review credit reports.
This task is made more difficult as there are three credit bureaus that collect information about persons and generate credit reports: Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. The information may not be identical in all of them, so you have to review, and correct, if necessary, the information in each of them.
Be aware that a credit report is different from a credit score. A credit report contains the items we have previously described; a credit score is a calculated number that is supposed to reflect your credit-worthiness. Your credit score is affected by the information in your credit report, so it is important to verify that all the information in your credit report is correct. The federal government has an excellent website clarifying what credit reports and scores are and how to manage them.
By federal law, you can obtain one free credit report each year. Since the pandemic that has been extended to one per week. There is an official site to get the free reports at AnnualCreditReport.com and you can access all three reports from there. You can also go to FTC.gov and click on the link to the free reports site.
Be careful as there many bogus, look-alike websites pretending to offer “free” credit reports. If you are asked for a credit card number, you are on the wrong site. On the official site you will be asked for your personal information, including your Social Security Number, so pay attention to the URL and be sure you are on the authentic site. You can then get reports from any or all of the bureaus to review and print if you wish. If there are errors that you want to correct (also called dispute), you have to log into that specific bureau, which we discuss more below.
Dealing with the credit bureaus
As mentioned, there are three credit bureaus: Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. To make any changes in a report, you need to register with each individually.
To register for the free services for each bureau you can go to:
- Experian,
- Transunion or
- My Equifax.
By law, they are obligated to provide, for free, access to your record, the ability to dispute its contents, the ability to freeze and unfreeze access to your credit records, and the ability to place a fraud alert. They do, but they do not make it easy. Many prompts on their websites will drive you to some sort of paid service that they provide. You may want those services, so read about them and enroll if you wish but you do not have to enroll to obtain credit reports or other key services.
Once you have registered and logged in to a bureau’s website, you can review and file disputes as indicated. When authorized by a power of attorney, you can register, surveil, and dispute on behalf of another. This is very useful if you are caring for someone with dementia or another cognitive issue that affects communication.
Being thorough in your review
When reviewing the reports for accuracy, don’t just check your own information but also scan for items that are not yours—like incorrect addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, or loans that are not yours, whether erroneously entered or fraudulently opened. You can dispute items online and upload supporting documents if necessary. If you wish, and we recommend you do, you can place a freeze on your credit record as well as that of the person you’re caring for.
Freezing credit for you and those in your care
When you place a security freeze, creditors cannot access your credit report. This will keep them from approving any new credit account in your name, whether it is fraudulent or legitimate. You can submit your request online, by phone, or by mail. A credit freeze stays in place until you choose to lift it. The freezes do not affect any credit lines you already have open.
To let lenders and other companies access your credit files again to create new accounts, you will need to lift your credit freeze.
You must place the freeze at each of the three bureaus separately. You may be given a personal identification number (PIN) that you will need to unfreeze the credit record. Don’t lose it. Again by law, the bureaus are obligated to place the freeze within one business day if submitted by phone or online (3 business days by mail). Unfreeze requests must be honored within one hour if submitted by phone or online (3 business days if by mail).
We recommend you keep freezes at all 3 bureaus and simply remove them when you specifically need to open a new credit line, such as when buying a car, taking out a mortgage, or getting consumer credit. Refreeze promptly thereafter. There is no downside to doing this and a big upside—one less thing to worry about.
Monitoring credit reports
Details vary by state, but all states require that entities whose data has been breached notify persons whose personally identifiable information was accessed and at least three states require that credit monitoring be offered for a minimum of one year.
Usually, you will receive a letter telling you about the breach that affected your data and informing you how to register with the monitoring service. Keep this letter as you may need it later to document what happened. If you have not frozen your credit records, do so immediately, and enroll in the monitoring service.
As busy as you may be, do not ignore this warning. Breached data often ends up on the web, where criminal organizations are always on the lookout for personal data that they can pirate.
Monitoring services will require you to register and provide the identifying information that was provided in the letter you received.
While sometimes the monitoring services have similar names to the credit bureaus, and may, in fact, be owned by them, you will need separate log in credentials. For instance, Experian, Experian ID Works, and Experian My Financial Expert are all separate entities with separate logins even though they are all owned by Experian.
Because the bureaus don’t communicate well with each other, you may find yourself making multiple phone calls and uploading the same documents several times. Generally, a bureau will provide a monthly review of activity around your data as well as special alerts. For example, if someone tries to open an account with your information, as those events occur. Often, you can tailor your notifications to your specific needs.
Do not ignore the alerts, no matter how busy you are.
With your financial power of attorney, you can open the account and do the monitoring for another person. If you need to speak with someone at the monitoring company on behalf of someone else, have your power of attorney at hand. You will need to upload it into their system before they will speak with you. If the person that you are caring for can speak on the phone, the company may be willing to take a verbal confirmation of your status as a spokesperson.
Someone has gotten credit using your identity—now what?
If someone has succeeded in opening a credit account using your personal data or that of the person you are caring for, there are a number of steps to take on your behalf and on theirs:
- Immediately place a freeze on the credit file at all three credit bureaus.
- Place a fraud alert on the file at one of the three bureaus. When you place a fraud alert at a bureau, they are obligated by law to share that information with the other two so they will be communicating with each other. The fraud alert notifies the companies that are querying in order to open an account that they should be extra suspicious of the person trying to open the account. A fraud alert is valid for one year under usual circumstances and you must have real reason to suspect that a fraud has occurred to request it.
- Get as much information as you can about the institution that has issued the fraudulent credit. Usually, the item on your report includes at least a phone number of the issuing institution, for example, Home Depot, Citibank, Apple, or another larger institution.
- If you have a credit monitoring service, contact them and let them know what has happened. They will send you information about what to do next and may be helpful in dealing with the credit bureaus.
- If you are not enrolled in a credit monitoring service and if that service has not been offered by the entity whose data has been breached, enroll in one. Most services will monitor multiple people’s data for the membership fee. The cost is minimal compared to the peace of mind gained.
- Visit www.IdentityTheft.gov and make a report. This site has a lot of very good information about identity theft prevention and steps to take when it occurs. After you enter your information, the site will generate your report as well as a personalized list of steps to take to recover. You can download your reports which can be useful in dealing with the credit bureaus and the institution that issued the fraudulent credit.
- Make a police report. Organize yourself so you can tell your story succinctly and in order. Get a copy of the report and review it for accuracy. Make amendments if necessary. The police report is very useful in documenting your case with both the institution that issued the fraudulent credit as well as with the credit bureaus.
- Contact the issuing institution and dispute the account. Expect this to be frustrating as you will encounter the automated phone tree that will repeatedly ask for the account number, which, as you did not open the account, you do not have. Simply persist in saying “representative” or hitting “0 and eventually you will speak with an actual person. They may require additional documentation, such as the IdentityTheft.gov report or a police report, as well as documentation of your identity or your authority to speak for another to respond. Weirdly, even in 2024 some financial institutions will only accept documents by fax or mail. In that case, if you have a lot of pages, we recommend sending them by USPS Priority Mail with tracking. Request in writing that they both close the account and remove it (and any associated information like phone numbers and addresses) from your credit file at all three bureaus.
- Continue to monitor your credit report. If the criminals were successful in opening a fraudulent account and charging a large amount to it, expect to see your credit score go down. When the fraudulent account is removed, your credit score should rebound.
There are additional actions and alerts that you may want to do or place. Reviewing www.ReportFraud.ftc.gov and www.IdentityTheft.gov will provide additional information on the steps you need to take. In general, the quicker you can put these steps in place, the better.
We know that dealing with fraud and financial scams will feel like “just one thing too many” when you are already truly extended, and probably exhausted, caring for another.
It helps to break the process down into steps and do a few at a time. For example, save the phone calls for a day when you are not totally spent and angry that the scam happened. The people you will be speaking with did not commit the breach, nor use your information fraudulently. They did not even write the processes and procedures that make it all so difficult and frustrating to deal with. If you patiently explain the circumstances, they may be helpful, and under no circumstance will it make your situation better to yell at them… no matter how much you might like to.
Someone has fraudulently accessed a bank account—now what?
When personal information is out of the web, not only can fraudsters try to use it to get credit in a person’s name, they also can try to (and sometimes do) access that person’s bank account directly.
One variety of direct fraudulent access is by ACH. ACH stands for Automated Clearing House, a computer-based network that allows for electronic funds transfers (EFT) between financial institutions. Once the fraudsters have your account number and bank routing number, they move money from your account to wherever they direct. It is therefore very important to monitor your bank balances and transactions on a regular basis. The best way to do this is to have established online credentials with the bank.
A caregiver may have online access to another person’s bank account if they are a co-owner of the account or if they have a durable financial power of attorney. In both events, it is best to establish your own credentials and not use those of the person you are caring for. With online access in place, you can set up alerts for transactions. See Financial Caregiving for more details.
If a bank account has been affected by ACH fraud, you will need to go to the bank and file a dispute for each fraudulent transaction. Bring your power of attorney with you. If you have filed a police report, bring a copy of that too. The bank will recommend that you close the affected account, or change it to “credit only”, meaning money can be deposited (like from Social Security or a pension) but cannot go out without your personal, identity verified permission. You will need to transfer funds to a new account and set up any automatic bill pays anew.
There are other creative ways that criminals will try to defraud you if they have been able to access your personal data. AARP has established a fraud watch network to help keep you informed.
CaringInfo suggests that you share this information with as many of your friends and family as you can. Many people do not know how to freeze their credit and so remain vulnerable when they don’t need to be. Caregivers may also not realize just how important it is to have a durable power of attorney so that they can act on behalf of the person they are caring for when fraud occurs.
