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Brendan Got Hacked!

Brendan’s worst nightmare became a reality—his wife’s identity was stolen! Was it just a minor inconvenience, or did he lose everything? In this short video, he breaks down exactly what happened: how he discovered it, and what steps he took next. His goal in sharing this is to keep YOUR digital life safe from hackers. 



Key Points Discussed:


  • Tips for preventing hacks

  • How hackers can view online every piece of your physical mail if you’re not careful

  • Recovery steps if this does happen to you


Transcript:


 Hey, thanks for joining me on another Coffee with Waymark. Well, it happened to me. I have notifications from the U. S. Postal Service, Capital One, Chase, Citi, U. S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and I know that there are a few more, but long story short, my wife was hacked. And as a result, someone went in and tried to do two things.


One, open up as many credit cards as they possibly could. And two, and this really surprised me, was that they applied to the U. S. Postal Service to get what's called “informed delivery”. I didn't know what informed delivery was, but after learning about it, I became much more aware of it.


Long story short, there's a way that you can get a service, a free service, through the postal service, which will scan all of your mail that comes into your mailbox and deliver it to your email box. So, you know, what should be in your mailbox. Now, If a hacker or someone who's, you know, bought your information, had that information, not only could they open up all the credit cards, but they could see everything that was coming into your mailbox and then continue to weasel their way and pry into your identity and continue to steal it and make things very difficult. 


So the good news is that I already had taken steps prior to any of this happening by freezing my wife's credit. And how do you do that? So, as you probably know, there are three credit bureaus. There's Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. And those three credit agencies, they allow you to freeze your credit.


And so, long story short, that's what we did. So, as you see here, you know, on Equifax, that is frozen. And then once we did that, knowing that, what stopped everything in its tracks was that we had those security freezes. So every single one of these forms that we got in mail actually says that the application was stopped because there's a credit freeze and they couldn't continue to process the application, which is great. So I was really happy with myself, but I wanted to do the due diligence and make sure that no other damage had been done, or maybe I didn't receive something in the mail yet that was going to show me that something actually had been opened on my behalf.


And so I went to annualcreditreport.com - definitely something that you should take advantage of. It's a free service offered by the government, and it's authorized by federal law. It allows you to get, once a year, your full credit report from each of the three credit bureaus. So in my case, I pulled down all three, one from Equifax, one from Experian, one from TransUnion, to see what kind of inquiries were being made on my wife's credit report.


And sure enough, right here, January 6th and 7th, here's Citibank, here's Capital One, here's TD Bank. They're all there. And so long story short, I am in the process of trying to inform all these companies that gave me this form - stop the application, cancel the application, put a fraud alert on my wife so that anyone who's trying to get credit in her name should be stopped at the pass.


Final thing that I did was I contacted each of the different credit bureaus and put a fraud alert on as well. What the fraud alert will do is for a full year it will pretty much put red lights on my wife's social security number so that if someone tries to open credit in her name they're going to be asked even more questions to identify that that person truly is my wife.


And hopefully that will put this to rest. More to come. I have a feeling that I might, I really hope I don't have to make another video after I find out if there's any more damage that's done, but at least at this point it seems like it's contained. Cross your fingers. Thanks again for joining me and remember to be well and do good.



Brendan is the Managing Director for Waymark Wealth Management. He has extensive experience in comprehensive wealth management. His focus includes retirement planning, behavioral finance, investment portfolio construction, education funding, insurance & risk management, taxes, charitable giving, and estate planning. Brendan has an ability to take clients' complex visions and distill them down to simple action plans, helping them move from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow.


Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor. Member FINRA/SIPC.


The LPL Financial Registered Representatives associated with this site may only discuss and/or transact securities business with residents in specific states which are listed on our website at www.waymarkwealth.com


The opinions voiced in this video are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

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Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor.  Member FINRA/SIPC.

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