 TITLE: What Is Account Takeover Fraud and How Can You Prevent It? CONTENT: How Can You Protect Yourself From Account Takeover?\n---------------------------------------------------\nWhat else can you do to reduce your risk of account takeover fraud? Following general best practices for reducing the risk of identity theft is a good place to start. Some factors may be out of your control. For example, your information may be leaked in a data breach without your knowledge or the opportunity to secure your information. You can, however, take steps to limit the ways bad actors can use your data.\n**Be meticulous with passwords.** Hackers will be more successful with their attacks if you tend to use the same logins and passwords on multiple sites. Ideally, you should have a unique, secure password for every online account. Using a secure password manager to generate and store these passwords across devices could be a great help.\n**Use multifactor authentication.** Simply setting up security on your accounts to send a one-time passcode by email or text can help thwart an account takeover. Adding biometrics like face recognition or fingerprints can also be effective. Multifactor authentication isn't available on all accounts, but it is available on many critical ones. Activate it wherever you can.\n**Safeguard your credit.** Even before you fall victim to account takeover, you might want to consider placing a credit report fraud alert or credit freeze with all three credit bureaus. With a fraud alert, credit bureaus will ask creditors to take steps to verify your identity before issuing credit in your name. A credit freeze prevents potential creditors (and others) from viewing your credit report and scores unless you deliberately \"thaw\" your credit information.\n**Consider identity theft protection.** You can get help tracking your identity, accounts and credit file with Experian IdentityWorks℠. With Experian's credit monitoring services, you can keep close tabs on your credit report and scores, receive alerts when changes are made to your financial accounts, scan the dark web and get help if your identity is compromised. END