This is crazy!
The South Carolina Department of Revenue announced that a “cyber attack” resulted in the social security numbers of a majority of South Carolina citizens being compromised. 3.6 MILLION social security numbers were exposed, along with 387,000 credit and debit cards.
The silver lining is that all but about 16,000 of the credit/debit cards were protected by the card makers with strong encryption that is standard in the credit card industry. But regarding those 16,000… and all those social security numbers… Yikes!
So what can you do?
On the one hand… nothing. It’s done. Welcome to our brave new world.
On the other hand… it’s not too late to take preventative measures now. Sure the state says they’re providing affected citizens with one year of credit monitoring and identity theft protection. But do you trust them? Do you believe that what they provide will be top shelf? More importantly… will they provide the kind of service that will help restore your credit if someone takes advantage of you?
Here’s the thing: Credit monitoring is not enough. It’s useful, but the key thing is what happens after someone takes your credit card on vacation or uses your social to get a line of credit to fund a dreamy shopping spree on Fifth Avenue.
Credit restoration is the key. The average victim of ID theft spends 600 hours and thousands of dollars cleaning up the mess. That’s why we offer our clients a service that takes care of all of that. The service we offer, called Identity Shield, takes care of all the typical credit monitoring stuff but combines that with comprehensive restoration services that will clean things up for you.
The good news is that it will cost your family around $14/month.
And in a world where your state government can give up the goods on you (not to mention Barnes and Noble!), $14/month is absolutely worth it!
