 TITLE: How Common Is Identity Theft? CONTENT: How to Prevent Identity Theft\n-----------------------------\nIt's nearly impossible to avoid the risk of identity theft completely. Even when you are meticulous, a merchant or organization you do business with can suffer a security breach and expose your information. That said, you can take proactive steps to reduce the chances you'll be hacked by following best practices:\n*   **Monitor your accounts and credit.** Stay alert to all activity on your bank and card accounts. Consider free credit monitoring, which provides you with current credit score and report information and can send alerts when new credit inquiries and accounts, changes or suspicious activity are detected.\n*   **Use an encrypted internet connection and stay off public Wi-Fi.** Better still, look into getting a VPN, which will help to keep your information safe from hackers.\n*   **Be mindful about online activity.** Some of the additional exposure people have been seeing in recent months comes from ramped up online activity. Whenever you download an app, store payment information on a company's website or share personal information online, you increase your risk of identity theft. You don't have to go dark; just take it easy.\n*   **Use complex, unique passwords.** Symbols, numbers and letters in passwords increase their security. Also, make sure they aren't easy to guess, and don't use the same password on several sites.\n*   **Mind your mail and discarded documents.** Shred any documents containing personal information before throwing them out. Don't leave incoming or outgoing mail where it can be stolen.\nSince identity theft isn't going away anytime soon, you may want to consider identity theft protection. Subscribing to a service like Experian IdentityWorks℠ provides you with identity theft monitoring and alerts, the ability to lock and unlock your credit file, dark web surveillance, fraud resolution support and identity theft insurance to help take some of the sting out of having your identity stolen. END