Identity Theft and Your Credit Report in the US: How to Tell Someone Opened Credit in Your Name and What to Do

What identity theft is in simple words

Identity theft is when a stranger uses your details as if they were their own. Most often they need your Social Security number (SSN), name and date of birth. With this set, they can apply for a card, a loan, a phone contract and even an apartment lease. The debt is opened in your name, and nobody pays it.

In the US, your SSN is the main key to your financial life. Banks, employers, landlords and clinics ask for it. That is why it sits in dozens of databases, and leaks happen all the time. Sometimes fraudsters steal the data themselves, sometimes they buy entire stolen databases.

How immigrants most often lose their data

Immigrants are targeted more often. The reason is simple: in the first years you have to hand your documents to many people, and it is not always clear whom you can trust. Here are the situations Excalibur Credit Solutions managers see most often:

• “Helpers” with paperwork. A friend of a friend promises to do your taxes or insurance “quickly and cheaply”, and copies of your documents stay with them.
• Calls from “government agencies”. Fraudsters pretend to be the tax office, immigration services or a bank and ask you to read out your SSN “for verification”.
• Phishing emails and texts. The link leads to a fake bank website where you enter your login, password and personal details yourself.
• Company data breaches. The data was stolen not from you but from a store, clinic or phone carrier where you once left it.
• CPN schemes. You are sold a “new credit number instead of an SSN”. This is fraud, and such numbers often turn out to be someone else's SSN, for example a child's.
• People close to you. It is unpleasant, but quite often the data is used by a relative, an ex-partner or a roommate.

How identity theft looks on a credit report

You may not notice anything for a long time: a fraudster will not send you statements. But the credit report records almost everything. Here is what to look at first:

Important: not every unknown entry is theft. Sometimes a store card appears on the report under the bank that issued it, not the store name. Sometimes a collection comes from a company you have never heard of, even though the original debt is yours. So first calmly verify the entry instead of panicking. What each line of the report means is explained in the article negative items on a credit report. Other errors that appear on reports are covered in the article credit report errors.

Why identity theft is dangerous for your credit history

The bureaus do not know a fraudster opened the account. To them, it is your credit. So every late payment, charge-off and collection on it hurts your score just as if you had stopped paying yourself. How strongly a score reacts to such negative items is explained in the article how negative items affect your credit score.

The consequences go beyond the score. With someone else's negative items, you may be denied a rental, a car loan or a mortgage. A bank may lower the limit on your old card when it sees new debts. And collectors will call you, not the fraudster. For an immigrant who is just building a history, one such account can wipe out a year of careful payments.

What to do in the first days if you find an entry that is not yours

The main thing in the first days is to stop the fraudster from opening anything else and to keep everything that helps prove it was not you. Here is where people usually start:

1. Do not panic and do not delete anything. Save letters, texts, screenshots of the report and the dates of calls.
2. Lock down your accounts. Change your email and bank passwords, turn on sign-in with a code from a text or an app.
3. Tell the bank where the fake account was opened. Say you did not open it and ask them to block it.
4. Set up protection for the future. A fraud alert and a credit freeze make it harder to open new credit in your name.
5. Do not promise collectors to pay a debt you do not recognize. First you need to find out whose it is.
6. Check your report from all three bureaus. The fraudster may show up at one bureau and not at another.

Next, the entries that are not yours need to be disputed with the bureaus and creditors. You can do it yourself, it is free, but it takes time, correspondence and attention to detail. We take this process off your hands so you do not spend months on it.

Credit freeze and fraud alert: what is the difference

Neither a freeze nor a fraud alert touches accounts that are already open, and neither changes your score. Your current cards work as usual. If you are planning a big application, you can temporarily lift the freeze and put it back later.

How to protect yourself in advance

You cannot rule out a leak completely: your data may be stolen from a company where you once left it. But you can make it hard for a fraudster to use it and make sure you find out about a problem quickly.

• Do not send photos of your SSN card and passport in messengers to people you do not know well.
• Do not read out your SSN on the phone if someone calls you. Hang up and call back yourself using the number on the official website.
• Keep your credit frozen if you are not planning new applications.
• Look at your three-bureau report at least once every few months.
• Turn on alerts for new accounts and inquiries in a monitoring service.
• Keep your documents at home, not in your car or bag.

Monitoring services — SmartCredit, IdentityIQ, MyScoreIQ — send an alert when a new account or hard inquiry appears on your report. That way you can catch an entry that is not yours in the first days, not six months later. More in the guide identity theft protection. And how to tell your own hard inquiry from someone else's is explained in the article what a hard inquiry is.

How Excalibur helps with identity theft

At Excalibur Credit Solutions, we start with a free review of your three-bureau report. A manager marks the accounts, inquiries and addresses you do not recognize and checks with you which of them are really fraud and which are an error or an old debt under a different name. After payment, our technical team disputes fraudulent and inaccurate entries with the bureaus and creditors and helps set up protection: a fraud alert, a freeze and monitoring. Results are individual.