Credit monitoring shouldn’t be limited to protecting your own finances. The benefits of credit and identity theft monitoring should extend to your entire family, and here’s why: people want to protect their loved ones, from infants to aging parents, but simply cannot be everywhere at once. Trusting financial service providers, such as banks, to keep your loved ones safe isn’t enough security all the time.
Fraudsters recently told a Florida woman that her granddaughter was in legal trouble. The 82-year-old woman was duped out of $700,000 in what is called a “grandparent scam”. Scammers convinced her to make several, high-value withdrawals from her bank. Now the victim’s family is suing the bank for not doing more to protect their grandmother’s finances and alleging negligence for allowing her to make large and unusual withdrawals even after red flags were raised.
Even though the woman’s personal details weren’t stolen, this serves as a stark reminder that criminals target our loved ones. We find it difficult to monitor the financial activities of loved ones who do not live with us. Protecting the finances of all family members can be achieved with a personal identity protection service.
It is a big business to steal from grandparents. According to a new report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, 28% of the $4.1 billion stolen from Americans through online scams went to seniors over the age of 60 last year. According to the report, about $1 billion was scammed out of seniors last year, an increase of about $300 million from the year before.
Also, children can be particularly vulnerable to bad actors. Over 1.25 million children in the United States were victims of identity theft and fraud in the past year, costing the average affected family more than $1,100 according to a study conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research in 2021. In the same study, over two-thirds of child victims were under the age of seven.
To help protect your loved ones’ credentials, you can also take the following steps:
- Protect your child’s social security number and birthdate information as you would your own.
- Add coverage for themselves and additional family members, ranging from infants to adult children to elderly parents
- Add elderly parents and children’s sensitive information, such as names and email addresses, to a dark web monitoring tool offered by credit protection services.
Identity-protection services play an important role in securing the whole family. Credit monitoring, dark web and internet monitoring, family protection, credit reports and scores, identity theft insurance, secure browsing, and device protection.
Is your personal information on the dark web? Make sure your identity isn’t at risk!
