Credit monitoring may not detect synthetic identity theft

Credit monitoring may not detect synthetic identity theft

http://www.freeannualcreditreportnow.com/

Credit monitoring services generally will not catch instances of synthetic identity theft - in which a thief uses a variation of your name, date of birth, or address in conjunction with your real Social Security number, or vice-versa. Because of the way in which the credit reporting system functions, synthetic identity theft activity is far less likely to be identified on a credit report than true name identity theft because the synthetic identity information used to open new credit accounts cannot be neatly matched to one particular consumer’s real identity information. If any synthetic identity information does appear, it is often merely linked to the main credit file as a sub-file, rather than appearing in or being linked to the main credit report header. When this happens, that information may be completely ignored by credit monitoring services that focus only on accounts and credit inquiries firmly linked to a consumer’s real identity information.