Author: mike

Identity theft has topped the list of consumer complaints filed with the FTC for 13 consecutive years and there’s no evidence that this year it won’t make the list for the 14th. Just how many victims of identity theft are there each year? While we don’t yet have the figures for 2013, a Javeline report puts the numbers from 2012 at 12.6 million.

This post originally appeared on Credit Sesame.

Factor in the more than 70 million Americans impacted by the recent Target and Niemen Marcus data breaches, and it’s clear why identity theft is a major concern for many Americans.

Identity theft takes many forms. Some of the most common include:

• Credit card fraud
• False applications for new credit
• Fraudulent withdrawals from a bank account
• Fraudulent use of telephone calling cards
• Fraudulent use of an IP address in order to engage in illegal acts online
• Fraudulent use of medical care
• Social security fraud (for tax and employment fraud)

If you know or suspect that you are the victim of identity theft, there are steps you should take immediately to stop the theft and minimize the damage.

Put a Security Freeze on Your Credit Report

Be sure to request a copy of your credit report from each agency (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion). If you find fraudulent items on your credit report(s), the simplest way to begin the dispute process is to click the item while viewing your credit report online. The agency will tell you what steps to take next.

With a security freeze in place, no one can obtain new credit in your name. New applications will be automatically denied. Each agency has a procedure for temporarily "thawing" your file in order to allow a legitimate application to be processed.

Contact Any Institution Directly Affected

For example, if you know your credit card was stolen, report the theft to the credit card issuer. If your checkbook was stolen, contact your bank.

For this step it’s really helpful if you’ve prepared a list of institutions and phone numbers in advance. You don’t have to write account numbers down on the list–that would be just one more way for a thief to gain access to your personal information. But do keep a list of what’s in your wallet, along with the contact information for each item.

Contact the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

File an Identity Theft Affidavit and create an Identity Theft Report. You can file your report online, by phone (toll-free): 1-877-ID THEFT (877-438-4338); TDD (toll-free): 1-866-653-4261, or by mail—600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC 20580.

The FTC will provide you with information about what to do next, depending on what type of fraud was (or may have been) committed.

File a Police Report

To complete the Identity Theft Report, you’ll need to contact your local law enforcement office and report the theft. Be sure to get a copy of the police report and/or the report number. Both your police report and the FTC Identity Theft Affidavit combine to create your Identity Theft Report. Your Identity Theft Report will help you when working with the credit reporting agencies or any other companies the identity their may have used to open accounts in your name.

Protect Your Social Security Number

If your social security number was or may have been compromised, contact the Social Security Administration (800-269-0271) and the Internal Revenue Service(800-829-0433).

It’s important to talk to the SSA if you have reason to believe your social security number has been compromised, even if you don’t yet see any evidence of financial fraud. A thief could be planning to swipe your tax refund, or to obtain employment in your name.

In addition to these five steps, if you have reason to believe the identity thief may have submitted a fraudulent change-of-address to the post office or has used the U.S. mail to commit the fraud against you, contact the Postal Inspection Service, which is the law enforcement and security branch of the post office. Fill out the online form.

For more information about how to prevent or recover from identity theft, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission offer a wealth of information and will walk you through the steps.

5 Steps to Take Immediately If You’ve Been the Victim of Identity Theft | Credit Sesame

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Kimberly Rotter is a writer, businesswoman, and mother in San Diego, CA. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English, a Master’s degree in Business Administration, and a Graduate Certificate in Distance Education. Kim and her husband own two homes, a couple of vehicles, and a few investments, and they live with minimal debt. Both are successfully self-employed, each in their own field. Learn more at RotterWrites.com.

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Terrorists have detonated a low-yield nuclear warhead in your city. How long should you hide, and where, to avoid the worst effects of radioactive fallout? We talked to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Michael Dillon to find out.

Yesterday Dillon published a paper on this topic in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He’s spent his career researching how the government should respond to disasters with an airborne component, whether that’s a chemical accident, an epidemic, or nuclear fallout. After poring over dozens of studies on how fallout behaves, and analyzing as many factors as possible related to urban detonations, he’s come up with a disaster plan that he hopes can be implemented by governments from the local to the federal level.

The best part of Dillon’s fallout plan is that it’s aimed at people like you and I, who won’t have access to information about wind direction and blast magnitude. It’s a plan that works even if all you know is that a nuclear bomb has gone off in your city.

This Is Not A Cold War Bomb

When I spoke to Dillon about his work, he was quick to point out that his disaster plan is still theoretical. Nobody has yet had a chance to study a low-yield nuclear blast in a real-world city — "thankfully, these are rare events," Dillon said. But as the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack grows more likely than a Cold War scenario, it’s crucial for cities to have plans in place. And that means a major paradigm shift in how we think about nuclear attack.

The classic nuclear attack scenario that most of us imagine comes straight out of the Cold War — or movies like Terminator. Multiple megaton-class bombs go off all over the world. The results are catastrophic, with whole regions burned to a crisp, mass deaths, and a fallout plume that stretches hundreds of miles. But the scenario we’re more likely to encounter today involves bombs that are anywhere from .1 kilotons to 10 kilotons. They’re small compared to the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and infinitesimal compared to the warheads we had in our Cold War arsenals.

"These events are more like a Katrina-level disaster," Dillon said. "Your city has the potential to survive, and that’s what we’re planning for."

The chart below gives you a sense of the damage radius of the bombs that Dillon studies, as opposed to Cold War weapons. The worst damage occurs in the pink areas (psi stands for pounds-force per square inch, and is used to measure blast force). People inside the pink dotted line run the risk of getting pretty severe burns, and those outside are more at risk for doses of radiation and injury from fire or other blast damage. What’s most important, though, is that you can see the range of radiation danger is much smaller with today’s nuclear bomb threats. A 1 kiloton warhead will pose a radiation danger up to 2 kilometers away from ground zero. Compare that to a 10 megaton, Cold War bomb, which irradiates areas as much as 40 kilometers away.

So you can appreciate why a nuclear attack today doesn’t have to mean instant death for everyone around — and could even be something that your city would recover from.

Taken from the Student Guide to Federal Nuclear Detonation Response Planning

What To Do When the Bomb Goes Off

If the bomb goes off and you are unhurt in the initial blast, you need to worry about protection from radioactive fallout. Because we’re not in a Cold War world anymore, Dillon said, "You don’t need a specific fallout shelter to get the protection you need." You just have to be aware of what kinds of buildings will provide adequate shelter and which won’t.

Emergency responders measure the effectiveness of a fallout shelter on the "PF" scale (you can see a FEMA guide about that here), but Dillon is assuming you won’t have PF numbers on all the buildings in your neighborhood. What you want to do is try to find what he calls "adequate shelter" in the first 30 minutes after the bomb goes off. What is adequate? Said Dillon:

Put as much mass and material weight between you and bomb as possible. Distance [from the blast] is good but weight — heavy things, concrete, large stacks of books, earth — those are good. Go underground, if you can get there. Again, you’re looking for concrete roofs and walls. Even just deep inside big buildings. A basement is the classic spot.

Think about your city. Where is the nearest adequate shelter to your home and your work? Is it a subway station? A library with thick concrete walls lined with books? Your basement? A large building with lots of interior rooms that are shielded by many walls? Dillon warns that you want to try to reach this place in 30 minutes, but don’t count on being able to drive there. Traffic may be at a standstill. Make plans that will allow you to walk or possibly bicycle to your adequate shelter.

Then the question becomes how long to wait in this shelter until it’s safe to go outside. In the movies, of course, we see all kinds of ridiculous scenarios, from people going outside within minutes to whole civilizations remaining underground for centuries. None of those are really accurate, said Dillon.

Your best bet is to stay until emergency responders come. Given that we’re talking about a low-yield bomb, which may have a blast radius of less than a mile, this isn’t a disaster that has taken out the nation’s power structure. Help will arrive soon. But let’s say nobody does come. Dillon says his personal preference would be to wait about 12-24 hours before going outside. But, he emphasized, "wait for emergency responders because they’ll help with an evacuation route." You don’t want to jump out of your fallout shelter and walk right into the path of the radiation.

How Does Fallout Work?

My first reaction to Dillon’s advice was disbelief. I could be relatively safe walking out of a fallout shelter less than a day after the blast? The answer is yes, because the most immediate danger is from what’s called early fallout, which is comprised of radioactive particles that are heavy enough to fall within hours of the blast. They usually fall in zones fairly close to the blast, depending on wind direction and intensity.

Said Dillon, "It’s going to be falling for hours after the blast. These large particles are the most dangerous and have the highest levels of radiation. This is the stuff that’s going to make you physically sick immediately." He contrasts the radiation sickness you can get from this early fallout to other kinds of illnesses, like cancer, that you can get many years after radiation exposure. Sheltering from fallout may not prevent cancer in the future, but it will prevent you from dying immediately of radiation exposure.

The other thing to keep in mind is that fallout isn’t a magical substance that floats everywhere and gets into everything. "There will exist a physical region that’s contaminated with highly radioactive particles," he said. "After leaving the shelter, you want to exit that region." That’s where emergency responders can help, of course — they’ll be able to tell you how to avoid that zone, and how far away to go. Certainly there are lighter fallout particles that can stay airborne for much longer than the early fallout, but those particles are not going to cause immediate radiation sickness — which is what you’re trying to avoid in the bomb’s aftermath.

Dillon added that the early, dangerous fallout also "decays really fast." The "dangerous zone shrinks quickly, and it’s a lot safer to be outside in 24 hours" than it is an hour after the blast.

Our pop culture is still straining to catch up with a world where nuclear blasts result in a scenario more like Katrina than On the Beach. We’ve been trained to think of nuclear attack as the end of the world, but it’s like many other disasters: horrific, but something that we can survive. While we’re waiting for a movie that realistically depicts a low-yield nuclear attack in the post-Cold War era, we can start planning our real-life escape routes and shelters in the citiscapes around us. One day, that big ugly building downtown with the thick concrete walls could save your life.

Read the full scientific study in Proceedings of the Royal Society A

Unless otherwise specified, all charts taken from the US national security staff publication Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation

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