 I'd like you to have Bill April here with his wife, Susan. This is the second time Bill has presented, and we'll have him again, I'm sure, because you provide such a valuable service to the community at large. I was just talking with, I forget the name, Alan, about how it's like a jungle out there and things are hitting you left and right. And so we're just very pleased, Bill's had over 30 years in the computer business from hardware design, systems, software. He has his AS, what does that mean? What's that? AS, what does that mean? Associate's degree. Associate's degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering and his BS, that always cracks me up, but I won't go there. Yeah. It's strange. Well, they'll see you, they'll see you right away, right, throw me. But anyway, enough, let Bill let him share his wealth of information. All right, great. Thank you, Judy. I'm here from the double-RP fraud watch. This is not just for old people. This is for everybody, okay? Everybody should be aware of this stuff that's going on here, okay? We're just the ones bringing you the right message. We're gonna talk about identity theft, steal your name, steal your life, okay? We're gonna show you how simple it can be and how vast the problem is. Okay? We're gonna define the identity theft, what it is, review the ways to, the theft occurs, recognize safe and risky behaviors, provide examples of identity theft risks, explain the steps that take, if you become an identity theft victim, along with all the information we have over here that tells you what to do, okay? Has anybody here ever been a victim of some kind of identity theft, even to some level? Yeah, no, I have, okay? I'm not ashamed to admit it, okay? We had to use a card and we used the wrong card. And that's always a, first I'll be like, well, what is the wrong card? That debit card is the wrong card, okay? The debit card offers you no protection whatsoever. When you put that debit card out there, that gives direct access with no middleman to your account, okay? With a credit card, using the credit card's money. With a debit card, you're using your money. So if you think about it, if they steal a debit card, they're stealing your money in seconds, okay? Whereas with the credit card, they'll have some degree of protection. You'll have a nice couple of days, depending upon the credit card company, to come back and say, well, I had a problem, okay, well, we'll give you a little bit of forgiveness over here, or it'll be only caution and more than 50 bucks, that's the law. 50 bucks is the limit they can charge you, okay? So all those are, yep, go right ahead. Well, if you're at the bank ATM, okay? Or any other ATM, that's fine. But you really want to limit the use of your debit cards, any place else, but the ATM machine. Okay, and you obviously want to be careful of the ATM machines. If they look as though there's another piece that's been physically put onto the front of that machine, especially if you go to a store like any of the gas stations that have an ATM inside, a lot of times these thieves will come over, they'll have two people. They'll have one person will be over here talking to the clerk, especially late at night, there's typically only one of them, maybe two of them, but, and they'll have another person go over there and put a little device right on the ATM machine, the little kiosks they have in the store. And what happens is that thing there will recall all the information you put into that machine because it's coming in before it goes into that machine. So it just swiped your card, okay, and it's meant to look like part of the regular ATM machine. But being that it's in a store and not attached to a bank machine, okay, it's okay, fine, they put that on there and maybe a day or two later they come back and they have hundreds of card information to play with. It looks like the front of the ATM machine itself, okay, and right where the ATM machine comes out there's some plastic housing and that plastic housing is what they put another one that looks just like it right on top of that. But inside of it, okay, inside of this new extra housing is where they'll have their scanner. So it looks similar, but if you go to a store that's not attached to a bank, one of the ATM machines over there, if it feels loose, a little bit funky, I'd be very, very reticent to even use that station at all, okay. So, yep. What about the... Well if you're going to Northfield Savings Bank and you want to go to a community bank? Well, this is pretty safe. Yeah, right, those are pretty safe. Those are pretty safe, I wouldn't worry about those. But like I say, if you find a station, especially where you go into a couple of farms or some other store like that, then you have this little piece that fits right over there. It looks like it's the same part of the station. That's where you might find a counterfeit one and that'll grab your information. But we're talking identity theft, it would be information from your whole savings account, social security card, driver's license and so forth, okay. Now, does anybody here have their social security card with them on their person right now? Good. You don't need to carry that ever, okay. How about their Medicare card? Medicare card, everybody have that in pocket? No, why? You going to the doctor tonight? You go to a doctor's department tonight? There's no need to carry that Medicare card in your pocket at all. Because if your purse is stolen, they now have your Medicare card. They will use that number and they will build something and you will get the charge there. So keep your Medicare cards at home. Never take them out. All you need to do is one time when you go to the doctor, if he has that card on file, you are done. Put that back in the drawer wherever you want to keep it at home. Yeah. Well the medical and dental insurance is a little bit different because that's unique to you and it's not something that is part of a government program that's pretty widespread where it's more unique to you. You're not going to find as many people who are going to be able to take that and use that as you as opposed to Medicare. They can build Medicare directly for a knee brace or back brace or what have you. The next thing you know, you just get a statement back, well I never had that. Then you end up fighting with Medicare about that. Okay, so we're going to get into here. And this is a little quick video here. Hardly just a few bits of personal information. The cod artist pretends to be you. She created accounts for me at all these credit cards. Then I was locked down. In fact, once your identity is stolen, the cod artist becomes you. It's a lot easier for me to prove that I'm you to get your money than it is for you to prove that it wasn't you that spent that money. Identity keeps steal from cars, homes, and right from your mailbox. 99% of debit cards that I used were stolen out of balances. They drain bank accounts, destroy your credit, and generate piles of fraudulent debt. When you're working with the two partners that I have, we took in about $3 million in merchandise and a million dollars in cash. But for victims, the loss is far beyond financial. I'm so tired of it never ending. Fraud investigators agree, identity theft is epidemic and no one is immune. The average person will become a victim of identity theft at least once in a lifetime. So how do you avoid becoming an identity theft victim? To find out, we went to the source. Meet Alice, not her real name. She's a convicted identity thief as is Kevin, not his real name either. Alice and Kevin are experts because they're part of the underworld of identity thieves, most with one thing in common. My drug use was 100% driving factor for a wide crime. When we first meet Alice, she's detoxed from meth addiction and in jail on seven counts of identity theft. After her release, as part of her probation program, she agreed to be our guide on a crime scene tour. To protect Alice's identity, she's wearing a disguise. And we'll see in a minute this will continue on in just a moment. Now, what's the one thing that is more important than this? What's more important than this? Your information, your personal information. Because when they spend this, they spend it one time. When they have your personal information, they sell it and resell it and resell it and resell it. And they keep making money on it. And then the other people, when they get their personal information, they keep using it and reselling it, okay? So that's the point, it's okay, we got money and then we get information. The information is more important than money, okay? Now identity theft, I'm gonna talk about the language of the crime, in particular, this word data breach. But here's that, oh my God, what's a data breach, okay? That's the exposure of the personally identifiable information, PII, it's a transformative view by an unauthorized person. The information we have, whether it be through the portals at the hospitals, whether it be through information, you have insurance company, whether it be something on PayPal, okay? That's all PII. Personal Identifiable Information. If it's intentional, okay, it's stolen or hacked, unintentional, it's shared and it's lost. Okay, and there's differences on that. Now we're gonna see over here, data breaches, here's examples of data breaches, and how many millions of accounts have attached to these AOL, 92 million people. And you gotta figure, not a lot of people use AOL anymore. So there were some folks who still have AOL mail. You look at Home Depot, 56 million, okay? What do they have in there? Well, they have your home address, they have your phone number, they have your credit card, okay, all this information is something that's, when they've accessed, somebody's accessed that, and now it's been breached, okay? Yeah, yeah. Whether we target, for instance, or Home Depot, Hanifords, the Gap, they all have their individual credit cards, and as soon as they have any kind of a problem with it, any kind of a breach, they merely freeze the accounts and they send people information in the mail, you have to go out and get a new card. And we'll be sending you the new cards out. Right, and the credit rating will be something that, if you don't use a credit card, okay, it's not gonna hurt your credit rating, but if you, all of a sudden, you have got, say, $50,000 worth of available credit to you, and that's how they look at it, it's just total available credit. But then if you say, okay, I'm gonna cut up this one credit card, I don't use it. Okay, goes to Peoples, for instance, okay, I don't use it, boom, cut it up. Now, that was good for, say, $5,000. You've just lowered your available credit by $5,000. Not a good idea. What you do wanna do is, okay, I might use that once a month, and you just go in and buy a stick of gum, okay, and then pay it off, that's using it, that's fine. That's safer. But you still have it, but you still have that, this, assuming we're gonna have $50,000 worth of available credit to you, okay, but now, if you cut that up, okay, and don't use it, okay, then that's something that they will eventually close that credit card on you. Oh, right, right. Don't open one if you don't really need it. Well, you wanna be careful, you've got a lot of passwords to worry about, so these are something you have to be careful of as well with the passwords to each and every account, each and every store, each and every credit card, yeah. So Identity Theft, we're talking about other places here that also have these breaches, they've had Dropbox, different healthcare places, New York State Gas and Electric, Mozilla, it goes on and on and on. So here we are at Yahoo, three billion accounts were breached. Well, unless you bought something from Yahoo, they may not have your credit card. So that's one thing to think about, they're gonna have your address, they're gonna have your email, okay. So these kinds of things, well, how much are they gonna have? All depends on what they've asked for. They may not have your social security number, okay. I'll be very careful about giving that out, that's extremely important. So the idea of Identity Theft, it's a fraudulent acquisition of personal and private information for a financial gain and malicious action. That's it in a nutshell. Somebody's getting something for nothing, they've stolen this information, okay. Now if they go ahead and steal information enough from you, they're supposed to wanna go out and open up a new account to buy a snowblower on time. You can go to these places and have a snowblower and buy it on time, pay it off for the one year, no interest, wow, that's a pretty good deal. But you have to have a credit check on that. When you have a credit check on that, what do they do? You gotta fill the information, boom, boom, boom. So if they have this information, they can do that and then they'll send you the bill. You say, well, I didn't do that, but now somebody else has got a freeze snowblower. Okay, that's why your information is so valuable. Right, if you freeze your accounts, which everybody should do, okay, then when they go to say, okay, you fill the information out at the store and let me just call up Equifax or TransUnion and I'm gonna see if your account's good, if you're a good credit. And they say, okay, well, who are we checking? Like this, okay, get the information. Oh, that counts frozen. What's the special pin number? Now the clerk says, I don't, I don't, I don't, and they hang up, okay? Because you're freezing your credit accounts, does nothing to hamper your use of your credit card or your debit card doesn't bother you when I order. But, right, but that's not using your card to, okay, your card is different, okay? Your credit card, you already have the allotted credit for that. Whether it's 20,000 or 15,000, whatever the limit is for that particular account, you already have that. You've already been through their credit check. But the people at the Equifax and TransUnion, they hold your credit rating, okay? So if your credit rating is less than what it should be, then you're gonna suffer for that. You gotta be very, very careful. So if you freeze it, then they cannot, without authorization from you, go ahead and, like I bought a car recently, when I bought a car, then I went over to say, okay, well, who do you use? Well, we use Equifax, okay. I go to Equifax, I said, we've got a car dealer who's gonna call you up in the next day or two, and I need to have a code for him. Oh, okay, fine. And after he calls up, I wanna freeze the account right away, absolutely, no problem at all. Okay, that's the safe way to do it. Freeze your credit reporting accounts, that way you will not have anybody create a new account for you, whether to buy a snowblower, or to open any kind of a new credit card, okay? So here's the examples of the person who identified that for the information. They have full name, birth date and place, social security number, seems like all this stuff is on most of your credit card applications, or when you go to a store, you're gonna get a new credit card for a store, what have you, this is the kind of information they're looking for, okay? So the login credentials, such as screen names and passwords, most of the time when we log in to some place, a site, it's with your own email address, okay, and that's fine. That's sort of a default situation. You can create different names for different accounts, but it just makes it difficult. We have to have a, we should have a different password for every single place you go through that has a password requirement. Never wanna use the same password twice, absolutely. You do that same password twice, if they hack into one, guess what, they've got everything going for you. You're a sitting duck, yes. Yeah, right, that's a password manager, and there are several password managers out there, some you can pay for, some with a free. Be careful, the ones that are free because you don't know where they, where else they're gonna take your information. So if you pay for it, it's a better password manager to have. Right, you can have, in fact, I have a list on the computer and I print out regularly of all the different passwords I have, the login names and the passwords. I have stored it on here and I store it on a, I have another drive over here that I store everything on as well as a piece of paper. And when I have all this information, when I go to the site, if I don't know what it is, more than likely I'm not gonna know what it is, I go there and I copy it from the list, paste it in the login screen and I'm good. But I have different passwords and different, for every single site that I go to. Oh yeah, yeah, if they get in your computer, it's all over. Right, obviously you don't wanna carry it in your purse or have it with you, but you keep it at home some place and obviously you're not gonna wanna be out in some library where you don't know who else may be near you and we've seen cases where somebody's over here working on their computer and as far as, serves a librarian knows that they're doing work on a term paper or something like that, but they may have a way of hacking into your computer because they're so close to you. There's also software in your computer like, I think Word does it and, what's the spreadsheet? Excel, Excel, thank you. Where you can make a document and put the passwords in it and lock that document with one password. So you only have to remember that one password and you can get into that. No one else is gonna get into it as long as they don't figure out that password. And I guess another big thing is make sure that you don't save the passwords so that, Right, whenever you log into any place and it says a little box over here says save password information, never, never, never check that box. Okay, if that box is checked, you click on it, it'll uncheck it. Okay, you never wanna save that information because if you go to that spot, then that means that they've already saved that information on their end. So if they get hacked, okay, then your information is available to them as well as somebody else. And it should be there most of the time. Yeah, I'm waiting somewhere there's either your profile or something like that where you can change your password. Okay, comment for it. So you have a question? Yeah, I was just curious, because I saved my passwords on my computer. That's what I'm talking about. It sounds like you're talking about something else. No, when you go to a website, suppose you go to a website and you're gonna log into the website, whether it be for some information, whether it be JC Penney's, whether it be LL Bean, they're okay, you're gonna log in, you have a regular account, you buy something from JC Penney or LL Bean on a regular basis once a month, whatever. Okay, and they say, okay, log in here. And they give you a name and they place for your password and they have a little box underneath and it says save password. Or save password information or something to that effect. Never, never, never check that box because it saves it on their end and you can save it on your end as well, but you save it on their end, it just adds to the availability of a data breach bothering you, okay? So this is the information we have over here that's... Be careful, Miss Chairman. What's that? He's been raising his hands. Sorry. The whole issue of password management managers raises the ultimate question, who can you trust and how, what criteria do you use? Password managers make me feel very uncomfortable because talk about trust. Yeah. Exactly. Now all they have is just your site you log in, the website you log into, they have your login username and they keep a password. And the password is typically generated by them. So you don't have to try and remember it, okay? It may be XXQ1248235BB. Well, I'm talking about the password managers. Right, for the password manager, that's the information that they have. They don't have anything else for sites that have information. My question is they don't have it unless you input it. Right. And so what's the criteria that people should use to decide whether or not to use a password manager? He passes it. Well, number one, I would not use a free password manager. All right, forget free. What if they charge? They charge typically around $15 to $35 a month. But you can't use that, my point is this, you can't use that as a single criteria. No, you can't, that's still not a criteria. Personally, I don't use them for the simple reason that they have been hacked. And it's not a matter of some guy at a computer, oh, see, see, see, see, I got in, watch this, I'm into the CIA now. That doesn't work like that. Somebody at that company got in because somebody else got an email at that company. And when they got an email at that company, he said, just verifying your name and password. Okay, sounds about right. I'll put my name and password in. So when they click okay, it doesn't go back to the IT department. It goes to somebody else. So somebody else now has a user account name and a user account password to get into that company. And they start from there. And then they'll find out, oh, who else where other kind of information can I get from this person? Maybe I'll send another email to the president of the company saying, I'm this person over here and I need this information. And it goes back and forth. I guess my question is, and you're already there, but even if you create different user names for different accounts, if you give all those different user names to a password management system, it's still, it's wiped out. Right. Yeah, I think it was at last pass who was hacked a while back. But they're the only one that I know of that has been hacked. But yeah, but they were hacked and there are several out there, several of which do charge it. It was $15 to $35 a month annual fee. But by doing so, there's no way you can judge that that fee is high or low. They bet it. You can look at reviews, online reviews for some company like that. And see if they've always been good to somebody or if they have a lot of reviews. They've got a bad review or if there's a newspaper story that says, they were hacked back in October. Okay, have they fixed their problem? Do they know what their problem was? So personally, I don't use them, but they're out there. They're usually pretty solid, but one of them was hacked and that's enough for me. How do you, what's your option? What's that? What's your option? What do you use? Excel, use it on, put them on a spreadsheet. Password protect that document. That's harder? Write it down and keep it unshaped like you. Yes. It's so simple. Yeah, if you keep that file on your machine, and you back up that file onto another drive and you print it out, then you're usually pretty safe. So keep pass, the one that Julia just mentioned. Yeah, is on your machine. That one isn't something that the web can hack because you're installing it on your machine. And I do believe it is free. Yeah. But I worked as a state agency, I will not tell you which one, but we use it there because our security guy said that this one was a good one to use. Stop it. Yeah. Take that. That's their opinion. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna dispute that. Personally, I don't want to use it. If it's free. It's not on the web, you download it. It's like using Excel. Right. Right. It's, you can, it can be used a lot of different ways. So I leave you careful about it. Free ones. Well, there's another issue now that's surface, obviously, and that is with, and I'm using these terms without really knowing technically what I'm talking about. But if you're dealing with worms or fishing or any of that stuff, does that make more legitimate the perspective that you shouldn't have any security information on your computer in general? Well, you're gonna have to have security information in your computer. There's no way around it. Okay. You have, you should have a password. You shouldn't just close the cover and then wait a few minutes to open it back up again and not have a password. It's just my wife and I in the house now, but we each have passwords on our machine. Okay. But you're gonna have to have some kind of security information on your machine. What I'm, let me give an example of what I'm talking about. If you use an Excel spreadsheet and put all your username and passwords down on that sheet and you keep it there on the computer, aren't you vulnerable? Well, you're vulnerable only to the point where if you name it password file, that's a dead giveaway, okay? Call it meatloafrecipe. Who's gonna think to look for passwords in there? Okay. Okay. Then you put a password for that particular file so they can't even access it. Okay. So here's another piece over here. We're gonna see where Alice is now in the garage and what she does. This is away from the computer stuff, but this is another big piece that. Our tour takes us to parking lots through city streets, quiet neighborhoods, regular places where people do regular things. Turn right here. This is your standard gym parking lot. This all-hours gym parking lot is perfect for car prowls. Why? Because while people are working out, they aren't exercising good sense by leaving valuables in their car. And so we're sitting in the parking garage just waiting for somebody to make a mistake. They also put their laptops in the trunk is a very common thing and we watch them put their laptops in the trunk. This is obviously a man's car. We probably hit that one for sure because he probably left his wallet in the glove box and guys that have a tendency to put their pin numbers or leave their social security cards and that kind of stuff in their wallet. See, so like this lady is going into the gym and she doesn't have anything with her. She's putting her stuff in the back and leaving to go in the gym. And so we hit that car real quick. And if you think security guards and cameras are a deterrent, think again. This is the security guy's truck. We've broken into that twice. He doesn't even lock his door. It does say that there's cameras but there are in fact no cameras. We've checked. Next, it's one stop stealing at a busy multi-level shopping garage. Each time a car is loaded up with purchases, someone is watching. Okay, so this is great because people are parking, they're going and shopping. Got multiple different stores accessible from the parking garage. Yeah, so see like this guy, he could be putting all of his stuff in his vehicle and then going down to another store because he doesn't want to take it around with him. He can't take the other cart with him. Many vans are great because people leave all kinds of stuff in many vans. Oh, this Ford truck could get into that really easy. Okay, stop. This right here, see they've got their windows down. I can reach my arm in there and open that. So I'm gonna hit that even if I don't think there's anything in it. Another example of a cash cow for thieves is a zoo parking lot. That's because it's full of tourists and distracted parents who are sure to be away from their car for hours. Out-of-state plates are great because people come with a lot of money. Anybody with a stroller is a good mark because they don't want to carry all their stuff with them. They put their purse in the trunk and a baby stroller comes out and they're good to go. I see the back of this car has got a bunch of stuff in the back, right? Yeah. All right, and it's also got the carrier on top. And look at that, you know a family's traveling in that. It's got luggage in it, it's probably got a laptop in it, it's got a ton of stuff. Plus I could sit and watch these people park and open their back of their car so I could see everything in it and whether I want anything in it or not. Sure. Well that's pretty scary to see people driving around watching you put things in your car and go back into shopping the mall. But it happens. Some of the places they go for information, dumpster diving, okay? Stealing information where they're employed. Calls or emails that trick you into providing information, pretending to offer employment, housing, loan, relationships, theft of documents, mailboxing, and we'll get into mailboxing in a minute. It's a good video on that one, okay? But the whole point is that we're just being barraged all the time with different avenues of people trying to get this information from us, okay? And we just have to be very vigilant in our mind to be saying, well, you don't need that information. I'm not gonna give it to you. Simple as that. Whether it be something on the phone, whether it be something where somebody's employed, dumpster diving, somebody's just throw this out. All of the cash register now only use the last four numbers of your social security card when you have a receipt printed out. But wasn't too many years ago where the whole number was printed out, okay? A lot of us remember that, okay? Emails and calls offering employment, housing, loan, relationships. These are all things you ought to be very, very careful of. A lot of times you go to these websites and they say, well, seniors are lonely people. This is the story, lonely people. Okay, so what are they gonna do? They're gonna, we're gonna have a website just for them. Our time, wow, we're gonna get on there, we're gonna find somebody very compatible with us. And they may only be three blocks away, they could be five miles away, we're not gonna, we're gonna find them. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna enter all this information in, okay? And they match you up with somebody. Well, that may be something you wanna be very, very careful of because is that something that somebody is going through? They've brought a membership to this thing, but they're not pursuing anybody but they're going through and they're trolling all this information. So if they find, oh, here's somebody here who's looking for this, but they live over here, they're, oh, fine. So all these kinds of things will be very, very careful about what you give out for information. Now we're gonna look over here and. Here's mailboxes. For identity thieves, they're a gold mine. These people obviously don't check their mail often and if they do, look at there's a little packet thing right in front, that envelope, that Manila envelope, that's got my attention right away. It's called mailboxing. Slang for stealing from mailboxes. For identity thieves, your red flag is a green light to grab outgoing mail. Somebody will be in the car and will actually flag and the car will stop immediately. Well, we know what that means and so outgoing mail is really good for getting bank account numbers and things of that sort because you send your outgoing checks to make payments on things. And if your mailbox isn't locked, delivered mail contains bank statements, credit card offers, tax forms. Once they get your information and create their fake identity, identity thieves can steal money you don't even have. Right now, what we see most is ID thieves opening new accounts instead of just draining your current or existing bank account. Mafe Rahul is a senior deputy prosecuting attorney specializing in identity theft and other economic crimes. She says identity thieves steal not just your money but any of your credit they can find. The thieves then rush to convert your credit to cash. A lot of times we first learn of suspect because they are caught on video using a victim's credit card or a victim's ID. I would say that the main thing that you use other people's credit for is to buy things that you know that you can sell. Department stores were really good because department stores have gold. Gold is an asset that can be immediately turned into cash. As part of a crime ring, Kevin was the master ID maker. Rahul shows us a sampling of his talent. He says he made between 50 to $100,000 a month in identity theft. Within any identity theft ring, people do tend to specialize. Typically, there's somebody who does the fake identification. Somebody else who will do the online IT, if you will, types of crime. Or somebody else who will do the stealing of the information through car prowls, through burglaries of homes, or through stealing mail from mailboxes. Kevin was busted after setting up shop at a cheap motel. Inside, police found a virtual fake ID factory. So when you put the mail out in the morning, you say, oh, I'll get a couple of bills I'm gonna pay. Put it out just before the mail process is supposed to deliver the mail. Maybe a couple hours ahead of time. Don't put it the night before. Okay, if you're gonna put the mail out, put the flag up if you've got a single mail box like that. And when you get back in, check your mail. Make sure that you've got all the mail you expect to have that day. If you expect to build a commit at a certain time, and it's been late or hasn't shown up for several days, be careful of that, because that means somebody has taken that envelope and now they've redirected that information. If you're going on vacation, you can go into the post office and say, okay, I want to start my mail. Fine. You realize that they do not require any identification from you to stop your mail. Yeah, I said that right. They don't require any identification from you to stop your mail. You would think they would. When you go to pick it back up, who are you? Well, here I am. Oh, okay, fine. But that doesn't mean that somebody else can't redirect their mail, change the mail system. Be very careful of things like that. All right. Now, we're going to close the identity theft where we talk about regular bills and how the mail fraud fails to arrive, okay? If you're rejected for credit all of a sudden, okay, that's a red flag. You receive bills for purchases you did not make. You discover unauthorized bank or brokerage account transactions. You're unexpected contact with the IRS by U.S. Mail. If you get a call from an IRS, is that the IRS? Correct. It's never the IRS. The IRS will never call you and say this is the IRS or Social Security or CMS, the people who manage the Medicare, okay? It will never call you. It will always send you the letter, okay? They send that first because why? Because the U.S. Post Office has a security division as well. So anything that goes through and is having a problem, U.S. Post Office, they'll bring it in as well, okay? So you'll always get the mail. It's always registered mail. And these types of email traps. Now, you get an email that says, or if your email, social security number, or bank account has been suspended. That's a very common one right now in just saying, oh, your social security has been suspended. Oh my God, boy, they go to hairs in my arm right away. Now I'm nervous. That's what they want you to feel. They want you to be nervous. They want you to be anxious. They don't want you to think clearly. So when you get this information, well, what are you supposed to do? It says, well, just log in over here. Well, where do you log into? Well, you log into your account at wherever. Well, that's logging on to the system. They've redirected that mail so that all the information go to their system, okay? Or they offer to install windows, windows as in that kind of a window, or they go to install a security system, or they're looking for, oh, they're looking for your information, financial information, they want your address, they want all this information about you. If you get a survey for Medicare, bank services, email, follow this kind of survey, they're looking for information, okay? Always a free upgrade to your bank service, email service, a PayPal account, free upgrade, okay? Be suspicious. Do not ever go back to the address or the phone number. They give you for these free upgrades or surveys. If they say that from an agency, go to the phone book and find that agency, call them. And more often than not, they'll tell you all it's a scam going on for that, okay? If you ever call up the information they give you on the phone or click here to go back to the office and send them an email, okay? You're not going back to that agency, you're going back to his pocket, okay? Any personal offers of large amounts of money that have been sent to you, we just need to confirm your financial information? Don't do that. Be very, very careful because they will send you these emails saying the first $5,000 of this award is on the way, we just have to verify your information. $5,000, sure, here you go. I'm at this bank over here and there's the bank account number and there's my address and here's my name and we're all set. Yeah, you are. They're all set, you just lost some money because they're gonna sell you information, okay? So here's another continuation of this one. Helen, not her real name, is one of Alice's victims. Because Helen didn't monitor her bank accounts, credit cards or credit reports online, Alice moved in for the kill. I couldn't even prove that I was who I was because she had taken so much, she had taken my social security number, my mother's maiden name and she had made herself into me. And I really put her through the ringer and knew everything about her and what I didn't know, I changed to what I wanted it to be and I took over everything and she didn't even know. I registered her online for American Express, I issued new cards, I changed the address, I got a full background credit report on her because they have that credit monitoring service so I just signed her up and printed out everything I needed to know and took over her whole life. Registered her on all three credit bureaus that she wasn't ever registered on, changed background information, changed her work history, changed her phone numbers, I changed everything. I held her mail, I was her and she couldn't prove that I wasn't. As with most identity theft victims, by the time Helen caught on, it was too late. What I found out when she went online and created accounts for me at all these credit cards, then I was locked down because I didn't know any of the information and she had all her information in there and she was able to order new credit cards for my accounts. When Alice was finally arrested, she had 10 fake IDs in her purse, including Helen's. She had racked up thousands of dollars in debt and Helen continues to pay the price. Every time I thought it was over, she would do something again to disrupt my life. This has affected my credit score by lowering it 150 points. It's very hard for me to get credit now. While you can't protect yourself 100%, you can take effective steps to safeguard your information from exploitation by thieves. Criminals are looking for easy targets, so don't make it easy to target you. Here are some safety tips, both high-tech and low-tech. For the high-tech, establish online access to your accounts and monitor them. Set up passwords to access your phone and computers so thieves can't easily access the information stored inside and don't conduct sensitive transactions like banking, shopping or managing investments on public Wi-Fi. Wait till you're home on a secure network. And for low-tech safety measures, have a locking mailbox. Don't leave sources of your personal information in your car. This includes computers and phones and paper documents that include identifying information. And instead of throwing away or recycling paper with personal information, shred it. As with all crime, authorities need to know about it to stop it. So if you have been a victim of ID theft, report it. It may not be solved right away, but the more people that reported, the greater the chance that it is that we're going to be able to find the offender and stop other people from being victimized. So stand up against this devastating crime. For more information on how to protect yourself from identity theft, visit AARP's FraudWatch Network website at aarp.org slash fraudwatchnetwork. Consider signing up to become a fraud fighter. You'll receive regular alerts on the latest scams and become part of an army of fraud fighters who are saying no more to con artists, criminals and thieves. Together, we can fight identity theft. Start by protecting your good name and your good credit today. So here's some of the identity theft myths. Identity theft is easily resolved? No, it's not. It'll take years to resolve a complete identity theft from somebody. If you have just a little bits and pieces that are stolen, they can add that with something else they can find on the internet. Did you know if you go on to Google or any other browser with Firefox, whatever it might be, and you put in your home address, okay? Well, come up is a picture of your home. So some guys over in Pakistan or the Philippines or India and they call up and say, I am the third party person and I'm working for IRS and we have a problem with your account and then they can start going and giving you a story. You think they're from the IRS and so forth and all of a sudden he says, you're working with me? You're gonna give me this information? He says, no, I'm not. Well, we're gonna come over and we're gonna set fire to your house. Oh no, you're gonna fire my house. Yeah, you got the house, you got the gray house with the green shutters, you got two big pine trees over there. All right, you can spit real fence. Oh my God, he's been here. Oh, oh, oh, you're so scared. But he hasn't been, he's just been to the computer and he's seen your house on the computer. Everybody's house is available on there. Unless you're out in the cabin way up in the woods somewhere, maybe. Otherwise, this company Google has sent a car, they've got fleets of cars. They're going around to every single street and every single house has been identified. So when they're in India or they're in Pakistan and the Philippines, they call up and they say, this over here, they threaten you with building your house down. They can see a picture of your house, okay? Consumers are protected by zero liability policies, no such thing, okay? If they use your debit card, they will clean out your account. There's no middle man in between. Quite often though, what they'll do is they'll take out a little bit over here and a little bit over there, a little bit over here, not to make you very suspicious. That happened with us. We used a debit card where we should have used a credit card and it was with a sherry in, assuring there's a company who does the warranty repair work and holds the warranty for all the iPhone equipment, iPhones and the tablets and any kind of computer equipment for Apple. And so one of the people in there had stolen this information and sold it and was using it. People out in Ohio someplace were using this information to, they printed up a debit card, okay? With a name on it, they just used this right away and they had gone out for Uber rides and Lyft rides and went out for, with a Chinese food one night? Yeah. So once we saw that, okay? We monitored that and we said, well, this is, we were monitoring our accounts all the time, once a week or so, we'll look all the various accounts and we said, oh, well, this is not right, okay? And immediately we called the bank up, froze that stuff over here, got new cards. In fact, we got a debit card now, there's only good on an ATM, okay? They can't use it going to a Lyft or going to an Uber or going to any kind of a restaurant. It won't take it, it won't work. ATM. There's no such thing as a zero liability. They get your debit card, they're gonna clean you out or they might even do it just to a piecemeal. And if you don't notice it, then they'll start taking more, okay? With credit cards, you do have $50 limit. And a lot of times that's waived. So if you get in there, if you notice it quickly and you notice something's a little strange, what's going on here, why is that? If you get phone calls or extra bills, okay? Then you can go in and if you're relatively quick on it, then the bank will, the credit card company will say, okay, we'll waive that $50 fee. You can avoid identity theft by not shopping online. It's kind of hard to do these days. So it's just one avenue where you can try and avoid it, but obviously it's really kind of difficult to not shop at all online. Shredding documents will keep thieves from accessing your address. Well, that's a myth, okay? It's gonna be very difficult to say, okay, you got a bag full of shredded paper and when you shred your paper, you have to give it to the wage company in a clear plastic bag, that's the law. Okay, so you have a clear plastic bag. Now, if they find there's been shredded straight through and they can, if you don't go in there and mix up the documents a little bit, somebody might wanna paste that together. Kind of a real long shot, not likely to happen, but it's possibility. But unless you have one of those cross cut shredders, it shreds down one way and then shreds the other way, those there, they're little tiny diamond shaped pieces and they're not gonna be able to pick those up at all. Okay, here's some other myths. Identity theft only affects adults. Everybody here got a smartphone? Most of us got a smartphone? Okay, with a smartphone, all this information is on the smartphone. Okay, who do you think gets taken more quantity wise? Young people with all the information on the smartphones are older people, with all of our bank account monies and so forth. Who do you think, who gets taken more? The young people do. They get taken more for less because they're always online, they're always going someplace here, someplace there, shopping, buying, investigating, doing whatever, but all their stuff on the phone, this is their whole life on the phone. And they're twice as likely to get taken as we are, but they don't get taken for as much money. But a lot of times the older part of the population, well, we tend to have a lot of either forgetfulness or we're lonely and that sounds like a good deal or we're trying to make, see, I wish I had more money for retirement so I'm gonna invest in this. There's a lot of different avenues that they could entice you to go in and give your information up. So oftentimes the seniors will lose larger quantities of money, but the younger population will lose more money more frequently. Devot cards are not safe for their credit cards, that's the myth. Credit cards are because they're obviously we've seen what happens there. Identity theft victims can count on law enforcement for protection? Not really. We don't have a police department here in town. And even if you go to Burlington, they wouldn't be much help. The state police has an investigative unit, the FBI, okay? But let's think about this for a minute. How many people have said, I just lost $5,000, hey, look at me. Nobody says that, okay? So unless somebody says something like that, the FBI, the state police, okay? They can't help, and they can't track somebody calling around, somebody sending out information in emails, or somebody sending information on the snail mail, surface mail, okay? All of this information we have over here, okay? Tells us information that we can arm ourselves with, so we can be aware of this, we can be more savvy consumers and shoppers and what have you, okay? The privacy settings on social networks protect against identity theft. Well, I'm just gonna go over to the browser, I'm not going to search function over here, but I'm gonna be in privacy mode. Nah, that doesn't help much. I was reading an article today, where they said even if you are in privacy mode, and you have a VPN, I'll talk about that in a minute, with that VPN, okay? When you go to that website, that website has some code in it, and it might even be like CNN, or Walt Disney World, or whatever it might be, within their code, they can take out information, like what is the operating system of your computer, what's the kind of default font you have, the size and the kind of font, I mean why would they want this? But they will do this, they call that fingerprinting. When you go to a website, even through a VPN, they can get this information from your machine. And this was done by The Washington Post, they just recently did a survey on that, and went to a bunch of websites, and went back and found out this code was in there, then they went back and asked them, so why do you do that? Oh, we do that for a customer service? We do for customer service, and why do you need to know the font of the machine? Why do you need to know whether it's an Apple, or Windows, is Windows 7, Windows 10? Why do you need to know that? Well, it helps us in our customer service, so. Right, okay. So the privacy settings are something you can't put much faith in those, yes. You're on any of the social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, you're saying that, well I know they collect their information, so they have algorithms to send you more things you're interested in. But there's no way to protect them, except not to participate in it? Well, the privacy settings help to a certain degree, but they don't help a hundred percent. In fact, whenever you go to a website, every different website has been set up years ago, this is where the format, so that you get a file from that website, and that file is called a cookie. Kind of a cute name, but holds all the information about what you have done on that website. What you have gone to, you're looking at L.O.Bean, you're looking up sweaters, oh, you're looking at all these kinds of sweaters over here, fine. Oh, you're looking over here at gift baskets, oh, you're looking over here, all this information, all the different pages you went to, that's all coded into this file. And guess what? They're not the only ones who can read these cookies. There were third parties out there, and these companies, L.O.Bean, CNN, they're making a difference. They say, look, I'm not gonna have a guy sitting here looking at this stuff and writing programs up to monitor all this stuff. I'm gonna hire this third-party company out here, and they're gonna go through all this stuff, and they're gonna find all my customers, and they're gonna give me all the, oh, but she was. If I'm L.O.Bean, I'm gonna wanna know other people who shopped on other websites. So I'm gonna have them also, and I'm gonna pay the money to go over and look at these other websites for, say, J.Crew, or different places like that. Oh, great, so they'll mine all this stuff over here. And when they mine all the stuff for L.O.Bean, it's okay, I have another category here for J.Crew, and all of the clothes that they have over there, the canoes, the whole nine yards. So this third-party company, and these companies, they're based out of Chicago, and they have the biggest data storage computer system, and it's bigger than this entire library. It holds, I think it was like 11 floors and a skyscraper in Chicago, okay? And they have all this information, and they're what they call data mining. They're going through there and say, well, I've got this L.O.Bean, they want this information, they want it from J.Crew, they want it from their own, they want it from this other, all the other people over here, oh, okay. So then, Disney World comes over, they wanna know, well, look at the stuff for Disney World. Okay, well, they also wanna go, these people go to Universal Studios? Great, what are they looking for here? What did Universal Studios have that Disney World doesn't have? Ah, okay, we have to get whatever they have, okay? So these are things that they're looking to data mine. So all these different cookies are available, yes. There's a terrific reason for that because once you use any credit card, that information may or may not be saved right there in that company. They may not be very safe in where they save things. Obviously, we saw at the beginning how many dozens of companies, hundreds of companies who have had breaches, and if you use the one credit card and that one company gets breached, then you use the one credit card all these different places. And that's the kind of information that these hackers will go in and they'll try and find somebody else with the same credit card number, oh boy, okay. Now let's see, I got her password for this thing. Maybe that password is similar to that one over there. Maybe if they just add some numbers to it, okay, well, I'll put a program and we'll add some numbers to it. So it's better to have a computer, a credit card that's unique only for your shopping online. Also along these lines, is it any safer to call LL Bean and order and put your order? It's a little safer. It goes into the same database, but you know that you are talking to someone from LL Bean, so it is a little bit safer. It's going to end up in the same database within the same computer as they have the same protection. And if they're smart, what they'll do is they'll have your individual fields will be encrypted so that you have a field for your bank account number, okay. Well, once they have that, then that field, just a collection of bank account numbers, that isolated field should be encrypted. And this over here, it matches up with your bank or your credit union, that should be encrypted, okay. So when they say, okay, well, I've got one, I can't get the other because it's encrypted. And what it does is encrypted, it just jumbles it all up and the way they can unjumble it is by having a very specific program that will match the numbers up to where they should be. Okay, but we never know what everybody has. Now I worked over at Central Vermont Medical Center for a few years and we had a lot of information that was individually encrypted. Okay, so you won't find just, okay, this is Bill April, here's the address over here, you won't find one line of information over here, you'll find everything here will be encrypted individually. Okay, and then when the big problem comes in, it's okay, I gotta pull this together, and though this information will come together, it'll be decrypted by that. Okay, PayPal's been breached, yeah, they were breached. And obviously they have since fixed their problem at the time and they've put a lot more training into their people. They figured, oh yeah, we're fine, we're okay, we've got it, but they were breached. It was probably about five or six years ago, but a lot of times you go someplace, you have an option going in as a guest and as opposed to a regular PayPal account. If you go with a guest, they are not supposed to just save your information, they just process it and that's it. You had a question? They would have everything, because everything on your iPhone is gonna be available to people at Apple. And I just have to thank my wife, she worked for USDA, and when she worked for USDA, especially in working in IT, every seven years, you have to go through a complete security check. That goes back to all your former neighbors, your present neighbors, kids, past jobs, the whole line, there's a full blown security check, including your fingerprints, okay? The database was hacked, including her fingerprints. And the government says, oh, yeah, we know what the problem is and we're gonna fix it. The car's out in the field now, folks, I'm sorry, but the car's out in the field, the barn door's wide open. What are they gonna do? Well, it's okay, well, we're gonna give you protection. This company's gonna watch your, what's your information in the credit? We're gonna watch the dark web for five years. So what happens after five years? The guys who got that information, what's going to tell them always, we got this information, they don't look at anymore. That's what they do, okay? So they've sense, it's okay, well, we're gonna extend it. You can buy extensions. But a lot of companies like Apple and like other places, if they come in and they say, okay, well, we'll offer you this, all that does for you. And if you have any of these web ID companies that watch yourself, all they can do is they can watch and see if it's already been taken out and is being used on the web. They're not gonna prevent it. So all these guys say, oh yeah, we got web ID, we're gonna prevent you from getting hacked. Can't do that, okay? If they see the information has been taken out from wherever and is being used, they'll notify you. Put the colors out of the bound at that point, okay? So you've gotta be aware of what's going on. No, those are not the, they do have new sections of their company, they have bought other companies that were doing the web monitoring, but the Norton and Symantec and McAfee, all those folks started out as a antivirus group and with the antivirus, so once they had money, it's okay, we're gonna buy the other companies over here. We're gonna buy the other companies over there that do the web IDs. So they will have that as a feature within their program. You can pay extra for that. But all it does is just say, okay, the information's out there. There's no way they can prevent it. Because if PayPal is hacked again tomorrow, what good does that do? Information's out. Yeah, what kind of legal obligation does anyone have for reporting being hacked? Well, I don't think there's any obligation. Yeah, I don't know of any legal obligation. When we were hacked from a Surgeon, I went to, what is it, the FCC? FTC, FTC and I filled out all the forms and everything and then one of their requirements is you have to inform your local police for they'll do anything further that certain criteria you have to do. So I called the state police since we didn't have local police and they said, well, where are these purchases being made in? It was Illinois and Iowa, San Francisco, they were getting around and they said, well, that's not a hard church fiction. So they didn't even want to do anything. So it was like, okay, now we're left to. All right, they want you to file a paper report because that was gonna be the tracking key to tracking your information. And the thing they should know about the debit card, there's a timeframe and if you don't let the bank know something happened within this timeframe, you barely can put it into a discoveries research phase at the last years. Fortunately, I noticed something wasn't quite right within the day or two and I went right to the bank. And I said, you print out the last couple of weeks transactions for me and they did. They said, what's up? I said, this isn't me. This isn't me. We caught it right away. So they reimbursed my bank account within a lot of, I would say, two weeks or something like that. And then they sent me a letter confirming everything. So I don't need to stay here and use PayPal. If I want, I've noticed that with PayPal, like they have the address to save, different credit cards that were saved because one credit card had fraud and they got to get a credit card or whatever. But I haven't noticed how to get rid of that stuff. So let's say I don't want to use PayPal anymore. How do I get rid of that? Well, you can call it up and say, look, I don't want to have my account. I want you to delete my account and you can discuss it with them and see what options they have. But obviously they don't want to lose your account. Well, they shouldn't be able to. Obviously, if you, you got a question? Yep, having a fixed limit that works good, yeah. So if they, if they start hitting that limit and you say, wait a minute, what's going on? Why is that happening? Things like that, yeah. So we looked at, these are the basic tech tips they brought before. They'll have lucky mailbox, don't leave personal information in your car, keep identity documents in a locked or private location, shred everything and check and monitor credit reports from credit bureaus. Now, this piece of paper over here that I hope everybody has this, okay, this has got two sides to it. All the names and numbers, okay, for every insurance banking, a federal state government, credit reports, so forth, all the numbers you need are on here. Make sure everybody should have this piece of paper before they leave. And if you have to freeze your credit reports, it's very easy to do that. But the information's there, it's online and so forth. Yeah, right, yeah. And these guys are, they've been vetted by the government, if you wanna trust that, to say, okay, these guys have good security measures in place and they're gonna be good as far as monitoring your credit. So they will be able to create a credit report for you once a year. It's free. It's in their computer, correct? Yeah. Yeah, well, it'll be in yours, yeah. And you go to the other different credit report companies. There's, let's see, we've got Equifax, Experian, Inovus, and TransUnion. The big three of the Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion is the fourth one is new, there's Inovus. They serve a very small community, so they're not as big a deal, but those are the ones that you can call them up or you can go online and get the information from them how to freeze your credit reports and then when you freeze the credit report and somebody wants to go out and buy a snow blower, he fills the information out and says, here, go check my credit. And thinking it's not frozen. And still goes to check the credit, says, nope, can't do it. Well, why not? It's locked. And you're using that snow. Right, if you go to L.O.Bean and buy some big purchases on L.O.Bean that says, okay, well, you have an L.O.Bean credit card, you've already gone through this process. But if you go to someplace new, you're going to buy a new snow blower and you haven't bought from this place before, then you're going to fill this information out. Each state can fill the price. The weaknesses, there's 50 different weaknesses because there's 50 different states. Okay, they're all going to be unique. The Federal Trade Commission has got a great program with all this information they put out. They've got a great program as far as trying to work with you to reconcile if you have had any kind of identity theft. There probably is much help, if not more, than an individual state. Now, we all lucky here in Vermont. Here in Vermont, we've got TJ Donovan and I've worked with him on a number of occasions. He's a pretty good Attorney General and there has been a system set up even before he came on board. But it was a system set up of consumer, what is it, consumer action? I forget. I'm not sure I can mention it. The Vermont Consumer Assistance Program, okay? And it's run, it's at www.uvm.edu slash consumer. There's also a phone number and you can call them up and tell them what you've got and they will be able to help you. They are the closest thing. Right now, we have to a consumer action program. They come right from Attorney General's office and they're pretty good. So if there's something you wanted to start with there, they would be the place to start. And then there, for instance, you went and had some work done on your car and when you drove it home, it wasn't fixed and you were having problems with the dealership making good on whatever. If you call them, they are very supportive, especially if you document things and you can send a documentation because we did run into a problem and they were within a week. I got a letter from a particular dealership saying, we wanted to inform you that for good graces or your loyalty or your use that we are gonna fix this particular issue free of charge and da, da, da, da. So it works, they're excellent. How does that differ from Better Business Bureau? Better Business Bureau is an agency that rates the businesses and tracks any problems that business may have had with consumers but Better Business Bureau does not solve any problems for you? They went, this group went to the Dealers Association in Vermont and worked with them and then they worked with a particular dealership. I mean, I was amazed how fast, but I had all the documentation, I had saved it all and how many times I went back and stuff like that. So going to the, these are the high tech tips in the sense that establish online access to your accounts and monitor them. So whether it be your credit card checking account, savings account, whatever you have for the credit union bank, have the accounts set up, you can call up and say I want to be able to access my account and monitor that. Whether it be through your smartphone, whether it be through your computer at home, whatever it might be, if you can do that, that's great. And what you want to do is you want to have two factor authentication and you say, well what's two factor authentication? That's when you say, okay, I'm going to log in but I can't completely log in until they send me either a text or an email or they call me okay, to a number they already have or an email address or they already have on file to say, okay, here's the extra, here's the second step code. So if I log into the bank and the bank says, okay, name, password, okay, do you want us to text you, email you or call you? Okay, email your call and I get a prerecorded message, comes up, so it's okay, this is the bank, if you're calling from this bank, okay, you're expecting to call from this bank, press one or press pound sign or whatever, some kind of code. So you press that, all right? And they say, okay, your code is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay, there will be some, you know, long whatever code, usually like seven or eight characters and they say, okay, and they repeat that several times and he's trying to repeat that because it'll be short term memories, okay, well, one, two, three, okay, well, listen for it again, okay, I'll get the rest, okay, so I got the whole number, you put that in and then you get access to your account. That's the best way, that's two-factor authentication, that's what you really should have when you're monitoring your accounts online. Oh yeah, it's very, very, very, very short life on that code. I have a question, so if you're using, if you have your bill panes set up so that it's automatic but it's through each company that you're paying the bill to, that's a better right to click in or something where it's all, you know, the information is paid from your credit card and I'm not sure it's click books or click in, honestly, but how save those paying your bills online? Paying your bills online is safer in a lot of respects because then somebody can't drive by and get access to your mailbox with a flag up and pull it out and scan it right there in their car and seal it back up with some, what's that glue? Glue stick. Glue stick. I always trap on that word, I don't know why. When they put glue stick back on the envelope, put it back in mailbox, then you have no idea that they've got your check and they just scan the whole check, okay? And of course with the smart phones, you take a picture of your check, boom, and right on there, there's your code, there's your access code on the check itself. If you pay it that way there, it's a way that it can be accessed without even knowing about it. People walk, drive, and buy. But online, when you're online, you're going to a certain particular website. You always want to make sure that it has the closed padlock and you see the hasp is closed like that and you see there'd be an address on the website and the address will say, www.something, that's a URL and then right to the left of it has a padlock and a closed hasp, okay? That shows it's a secure site and it's a site that you can use because they'll encrypt everything from your machine to the company. It's all encrypted. Right. Yep. And that's what happens. I mean, that's the... That's the breach. And if something is breached and your information is gone to somebody else and they don't just steal it, they just copy it, so... I would say that the bank, going through the bank and having the bank make the payments for you, yeah, is safer. Yeah, that way there is safer. So beside the padlock, you want to make sure it says HTTPS, okay? The HTTPS is hypertext... hypertext protocol security. The last S has to be for security. And with the last S for security, that means, again, with the padlock and the hasplows and the HTTPS, then everything will be encrypted from your machine all the way through to the company at the other end. Okay, so that's critical to have that information. If you go someplace and you're going to put any kind of information in and you don't see that HTTPS or you don't see the padlock or the toilet, don't even go to that site, okay? Use caution using public Wi-Fi and purchase the VPN. Now, the network they have in here, okay, whether you use on your laptop whether you use the machine, it's considered a public Wi-Fi network, okay? They give you a password to use on the machines and after you use the machines, they wipe the machines and things like that, but in between, you don't want somebody over here with a laptop who can access your machine because he's close to you and they have that, okay? A VPN is a virtual private network and what the company with a VPN does and there are free ones and there are pay ones. And again, you have the same question about whether it's free, why is it free? Versus if it's paid, you have a little, you have more of a fiduciary arrangement between this kind of level of trust, the level of illegal containment between the two of you. So I don't want to be really cautious about a free VPN. And what that does is okay, when soon as you connect into your browser, your browser, whether it be Bing, whether it be Google Chrome, whatever it might be, that information immediately, okay, is sent over to another state more than likely. It may go to Chicago, it may go to Arizona, it may go to Indiana, it may go to Boston, or it may go to Canada. And this VPN then takes the information and it also will hide your identity until you actually put something in, okay. But it will take this information and say, okay, he's not in Waterbury, Vermont. He's up in Canada. Wow, okay. So that gives you a little bit of safety to a certain degree, plus the fact that they're gonna keep and they're gonna filter everything going from here to there. So that's always a good thing to have VPN. And, okay, create pass phrases. Do not use the same one repeatedly for all accounts. Pass phrase is one step better than a pass word. So if you see, I can see the morning light today. You just use the first letter of each of that string of words. And then when you have two day, you have the number two in DAY. Now maybe you wanna put it D in the at sign and then have Y. Maybe you wanna throw some capital letters in there. But that's a pass phrase as opposed to a pass word. Pass word is the word password. And that's the simplest password that everybody uses. And so often, oh yeah, that's the first thing the hackers do. Password, oh yeah, it worked. Okay, oh it's okay, well, what else can we do? Oh, we're gonna put in the day of the week. We're gonna put in the month. We're gonna put a person's name. Oh, look at online and see what we have over there. Oh, okay, I have online. They have their kids. Oh, let's put down Dorothy. Let's put down Alexander. They put the people who use that for password names. And guess what? If it's right up there on Facebook or anything else, any of the social program, then these guys will find it. So all they need is one piece of the information. They find your name. Maybe they've got this. Oh, we can get a social security number here. We can get this. We get the bank. We get the account number. They piece all this together to build a profile. Can I just go back to the VPN? Is there one you recommend? No, I don't wanna recommend any one. There were several out there. There's probably three or four really good ones out there. And you'd have to go out and do a little bit of research and ask, well, any kind of reviews on, this one reviews on that one or reviews, so forth. And when you say, you just search reviews on VPNs, you'll find several different companies who will be happy to tell you this is the best or this one's the best. So you find somebody who it's not associated with a VPN. You find somebody who is maybe with Norton antivirus or maybe with McAfee. And if they have an idea of what is a good VPN and maybe they sell one. So maybe, well, if this is on the top, I don't wanna go with this because, of course, this is the best because they're rating it. Okay, but yeah. Does AARP have any set service? No, we have no VPN. No, we have a website, but we don't have the VPN. So, and the key thing is here, do not use the same password or passphrase for each and every account you have to log in. That is critical because if they get into one, they get into everything else. And you wanna change them regularly. You wanna change them couple of times a year. And that's why this list is handy. You can go back in and say, okay, on this date, I had these over, so I'm gonna go back in and change them. And in fact, for those of us who have accounts with social security, if you don't go on a regular basis, then they'll send you an email, okay? And they'll have no links to it. They'll say, you know, you should change your password. It's been a long time since you've logged in. And if you don't get one you forget about, you go to log in and they'll say, oh, that doesn't work. You have to re-identify yourself all over again. Oh, boy, okay? So, if you're now you're stolen, you've got a lot of paperwork ahead of you. Note names, contact information, date, time, details, contact, reports, suspected breach to the banks, contact reports, suspected breach to credit card companies, notify credit bureaus, the Institute of Alert or Freeze, and on an alert, okay, it's temporary. It goes for usually a couple of months, okay, 90 days. But it's instantaneously, boom, as soon as the agent hears that you want to alert on there, that's it, right away. A freeze, it might take, I think, three or four days. So if you know there's some problem, alert is faster than a freeze. And it's only temporary, so that way there's okay, fine. But if you have your credit frozen, then you're fixed. You've got no problem there, okay? These are the four names, the four numbers of the things over here on this sheet of paper here, that we should have. That thing about, you were just saying that you get notified by Social Security or someone else that says, you should change the password. How do you know if that's legitimate? Well, they'll send you something and it'll say Social Security on it. One thing you want to look at is when you look at any kind of a website, and on that web, any kind of an email, rather, you look at an email and it'll say, Social Security Administration. And then within brackets, it'll show you the origin of where they came from. If that email in the brackets over here does not come up and say Social Security, or in this case the ssa.gov, I don't care what this left side said, the right side tells you where it actually came from. That is critical on an email, absolutely critical. So when you get an email that says, from Morrisville Bank, Bank Over Morrisville, whatever it might be, okay, and you look over here it says, Fred's Energy Service, okay. Didn't come from the bank, came from Fred's Energy Service, okay. Not to pick on Fred, but that's, they're both at Morrisville. Right, yeah, at the very, very top of the email, you'll see the name that is displayed, and then within brackets here, you'll see the name of where the person was that sent it. They might say, no reply, but Joe's Lawn Mower Shop. So Joe's Lawn Mower Shop over here is not Social Security, Social Security is ssa.gov. And I think with the Social Security, it's when you, if you haven't logged in and you go to log in, and you haven't logged in in a while, it'll pop up that you need to change your password. And it'll come up and it'll say, you have to answer all these different questions, information you have put down when you initially set up your Social Security account. Don't I know people are really interested because of all the questions. I did want to remind everybody it is eight, and I want to be cognizant of people's time. So. Yeah, we're just about done here, which is good, so. If your identity is stolen, report suspected breached to the Federal Trade Commission, file local police report obtained copy, create a recovery plan, ftc.gov, and this information covers that here. And then the Federal Trade Commission, here's their numbers. Here's the, again, the numbers of the credit reporting bureaus. And over here is the official Medicare website, medicare.gov, not medicare.net, not medicare.com, things like that. People will see something, they'll get an email and they'll see that, and you'll say, oh, it must be Medicare, medicare.gov. Very critical, okay. Senior Medical Patrol, SMP, those folks, if you ever come in contact with them, they're great. They are the experts in Vermont on any kind of stuff to do with Medicare. If you see a promotional time when they're gonna come and speak about Medicare, they are excellent, really gotta give them a lot. And COVE, Council on Vermont Elders, another excellent group on Medicare, okay. The fraud wash network, that's our website there. It's on that sheet of paper as well, honestly. We have an information helpline with any kind of fraud question you have. People on that web, they're all volunteers, but they're all volunteers that have been vetted and have this information. And then, this is our website, www.arp.org slash fraud wash network. There's no spaces in there, all big, one long word. And we do have a map, and on this big map, off of that website, you can, it shows on this particular picture or not. But on that website, it shows there's a map of the United States. And it's okay, where you're calling from or what you're looking at, what you're interested in. You can look in there and you can type in your name of the town and the state, where you're putting your zip code. And then they'll bring in, and they'll zero in right on that state. And what you'll see is all of these different little triangles, and these are reports that have been filed about fraud in the state. So you might get a quick picture of what's going on for fraud in your state. So that's it. Hope you've got everything out of it. Awesome, I'll give you. Of course.