Protecting Your Financial Information
A lot of people do not realize that their various creditors and banks have the legal right to sell their information to telemarketers, direct mailers, and retailers among others. You probably do not want your social security number, spending habits, and the balances of your accounts just to name a few used to have someone target you for a product or service that they are selling.
Over the last couple of years you have probably been getting privacy act notices from your bank and other creditors and you consider them junk mail. Well guess what, throwing them away was one of the worst mistakes you may have ever made. Those notices were by no means junk mail instead the Federal government has now made it mandatory that any of those institutions that collect your personal information give you the option to opt out of having that personal information sold to a third party for any reason. If you are throwing those notices away then you are telling these companies that it is actually ok for them to sell your information to anyone who happens to name the right price.
Unfortunately in some cases that right price has actually come from criminals who in turn will illegally use your information to scam you and have been known to cause millions of bogus charges to a variety of different credit cards. This can ruin your credit rating in a matter of minutes. These criminals do not care who they are hurting as long as they get the money that they are after. The crime rate due to scam was staggering last year and it affected over 2 million people across the United States.
So as you can see you need to find ways to protect your financial information. Therefore if you were one of the many that tossed out those privacy notices there is still hope. All you will simply have to do is call each of the financial institution that you do business and tell them that they are not allowed to disclose any of your personal information. Once you do this they no longer have a legal right to sell a single piece of your information. If they do so after you have opted out you have the legal right to sue them for any damages that came as a result.
So as you can see protecting your personal financial information is high priority. If you happen to get one of those legal notices in the mail then you need to be sure that you are opening them. You also need to be sure that you follow all of the instructions needed to opt out of having your information sold. Your personal information is private do not let someone else get a hold of it.