"Hello, this is the fraud department of American Express, is Stephen Snyder available?"That's what my assistant Brenda heard when she answered the phone recently.I quickly called back.The gentleman asked if I recently purchased anything from Sony Electronics and shipped it to New Jersey.New Jersey? I don't own property in New Jersey. So I told him, "No."At that moment I realized that I had become a victim of identity theft. American Express immediately closed the account and issued me a new card that I received the next morning. The person I spoke to at American Express told me it seemed like an isolated incident since my other accounts with them were not compromised...but recommended I carefully review my next account statement for any suspicious charges.Whew. That was resolved. I was lucky. But many people aren't so lucky.The average amount of time it takes for someone to clear his or her name and credit reports of ID theft is three months...at an average cost of $1,200.I'll never forget the first time I became a victim of identity theft...I had just presented the Credit After Bankruptcy seminar to 987 people in Columbus, Ohio (nice people there—well, except for one of them...)You see...several weeks later I received a telephone call from Nextel.Someone from our Columbus seminar had stolen my identity and bought 11 Nextel cellular phones with my credit card and had them shipped to a different state. (What do you do with 11 cell phones?)OK, during the seminar you can see my Social Security number and home address on the overhead transparencies when I show what my credit reports looked like after I filed bankruptcy.Shame on me.My wife, Michele, has nagged me about this for years. But to me it was a risk worth taking. All I know is, when I go to a seminar and look at overheads with a lot of information blacked out, I'm immediately suspicious. So I don't do it. But, as usual, she was right.Had Nextel not called, I would never have known my credit reports were accessed without my permission.So what is the best way to monitor activity on your three credit reports?To be honest with you, I had no idea. So I started to explore. I wanted a service that would put me 100% in control of all 3 of my credit reports and would alert me whenever there was a change on them.After several weeks of research I didn't find a service that made sense.The problem with 99% of the credit report monitoring services has been they don't monitor all 3 national credit reporting agencies at the same time.So you could subscribe to TransUnion's credit report monitoring service—but it monitors your TransUnion credit report.Or, you could subscribe to Experian's credit report monitoring service—but it monitors only your Experian® credit report.You get the idea.But what if the thief uses a lender that accesses a credit report that you aren't monitoring?Exactly.It just doesn't make sense...unless you're monitoring ALL THREE of your credit reports you're paying for a false sense of security. Monitoring only one of your credit reports is like putting locks on the front and back doors of your home, but leaving the side door wide open, allowing anyone to just come right in and rob you blind!I guess you could purchase each individual credit reporting agency's credit report monitoring service...but it would be expensive and cumbersome to manage three separate accounts (you'd have to remember a bunch of user names and passwords and access three different websites...way too much work.)So after this last identity theft episode I decided to use my contacts and influence. I asked a colleague of mine who has worked for both Fair Isaac Corporation (the creators of the FICO® credit score) and Equifax (one of the three national credit reporting agencies) what service he would recommend.I was very clear about what I expected in a credit report monitoring service:1. I wanted to know when any new accounts were opened in my name2. I needed to know every time there was a credit inquiry made3. I wanted to know if/when my home address changed4. I needed to know when any changes were made to any credit accounts5. I needed all these things in one service that monitored all three of my credit reportsAnd the most important part...6. I needed to be able to receive any alerts via email or text messaging on my cell phoneA pretty tall order.My colleague told me that there was only one service that fit the bill.I had never heard of the company he recommended.In fact, not one person who approached me at the Credit After Bankruptcy seminar in the last 10 years has ever mentioned them. And I must admit, I was a little skeptical.But on his recommendation I decided to give the service a test drive in July 2005.To sum up my experience—I love it! I highly recommend you get this service, tooNow before I tell you the name of the service and how to sign up for it—there's another use for this service that I think you'll enjoy if you have kids (and I guarantee the company who created this service didn't think of this benefit).You can monitor the credit usage of your teenagers or college students.I think this is critically important because I'm astounded how many college students file bankruptcy due to taking on too much credit they cannot afford. Between student loans and buying a few necessities during their college years, many college students are earning a degree in bankruptcy!Would it make a difference if they knew mommy and daddy would be monitoring their use of credit? I think so.Now the bad news...The credit report monitoring service I'm going to recommend to you isn't perfect...It has flaws...The biggest one: they advertise that you'll receive your credit scores as part of their service. Don't believe it.They're not your real FICO credit scores. They use "fake" credit scores. Yuck. I was disappointed. My first reaction was, "You've got to be kidding." But it's okay. Remember, you're not using this service to monitor your credit scores. You're using this service to monitor and protect your credit reports.But there is one more not-so-obvious benefit to subscribing to this service.You can stop guessing when you should purchase your FICO credit scores again to see if they have increased. I've been known to purchase my scores every 60 days (do the math $44.85 x 6 = $269.10 each year).I don't need to do that anymore. I will now purchase my FICO scores only when I see activity that I feel will significantly change my scores and/or I'm getting ready to make a large purchase (e.g., a new car or new investment property).If you're working on increasing your FICO credit scores this service will REALLY help you monitor your results and save you moneyThe name of the service is Identity Guard Fraud Alert.To sign up, you must go to: www.TheBestCreditReportMonitoringService.com After you click on the link, it will take you to a page that summarizes all of the benefits of this service. Then you can click from there to be redirected to their official site.If you want to protect your credit and want to know when your scores are going up (without actually buying them), then this is a no-brainer.
Credit Report Monitoring Service
The electronic mail has become one of the most vital services for any business regardless if it is large or small, thus e-mail monitoring services have also become quite a popular. An e-mail system that does not work properly generally costs companies a lot of time and money. Website monitoring services today offer unique testing features including end-to-end e-mail infrastructure. The e-mail monitoring service offers companies the possibility of observing the sending process and checking the actual delivery of e-mail messages. Such services monitor and alert on the function and latency of the server's ability to send and receive e-mails, thus you can rest assured that your e-mail system is working, or quickly troubleshoot in case any problems are triggered.
Website monitoring is also a very important aspect that should be kept in consideration by companies who provide services through web sites. Whenever you wish to see whether a certain web site is online, you only need to perform a simple procedure of sending an HTTP request to the server and then look at the result. In case you receive something reasonably logical, you are right to assume that everything is ok. All this can be very easily automated by many website monitoring services existing on the World Wide Web. Of course, there is a lot more to it like geographically redundant testing servers, comparison of strings, of downloaded pages and many others. The fundamental steps of any website monitoring service remain the same simple ones, such as poll the server and see whether it replies.
However, when we talk about e-mail monitoring services the situation is a little bit different and the same steps do not hold true. It is important to note that telneting into a mail server in a specified port is quite easy and very much similar with the web sites procedure, allowing the individual to rapidly ascertain that the server is online. The fundamental difference though is that the electronic mail service is much more complex and thus there are a lot more problems that can occur between the point a message reaches a server and the point it is delivered. Some of the most common issues include server misconfiguration, wrong messages spooling, wrong permissions settings for various mailboxes, message malformation and so on and so forth. Thus, knowing that the sever is ready to receive e-mails tells you very little as to whether you will eventually see what arrives into your local inbox or web e-mail interface.
Most e-mail monitoring services provide outsourced monitoring administration and content assessment services for those companies that choose to monitor their own e-mail systems. Today, providing companies have developed unique outsourced e-mail administration services that allow the receiving companies to safely and cost-efficiently outsource the administration duties associated with e-mail and website monitoring, content filtering and image filtering technology.
These e-mail monitoring services provide companies with the possibility to achieve e-mail compliance and corporate governance by providing the right people and processes in order to review, assess, and report upon all confirmed cases of e-mail abuse. Administration services offered are truly making the e-mail monitoring process easier to implement, administrate, manage and cheaper to run.
Most such monitoring services provide customers with the choice to outsource the high-risk and resource-heavy administration function and allow their businesses to concentrate on other core office and system administration tasks. It has been shown that after using the services provided by outsourced e-mail monitoring administrators, companies reduce their field costs by 40 to 80% per year as compared to managing the e-mail monitoring administration processes inside the company.
Both Stephen Snyder & David Yuri are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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