访谈录 Interview 2007-08-28&08-30, 学生,ID盗贼的首选?(在线收听

Here is a warning for college students, you are a prime target for identity thieves. so before you go back to school, there are some things you and your parents need to know. Financial author and radio host Dave Ramsey is here to explain. Good morning, Dave. (Good morning.)

I wanna begin by reading a letter that you got from one of your listeners, 'cause it really illustrates the problem.

This listener wrote: My third day at college, I applied for several credit cards on campus, five years later I found out that all of my personal information was posted on a website. I had cars bought in my name, and credit accounts across the country. A college student who ran one of the credit card booths was responsible for posting my information. Even though I now have a new social security number, I constantly have to monitor my credit reports. I have had to explain all this to employers that run a background check on me. Those free T-shirts almost wound up costing me 150,000 dollars. How likely is it that a college student will have their ID stolen?

More likely than any other age group, sadly that’s the NO.1 age group for identity theft. And identity theft as we all know is like a big deal on America right now. But this 18-29 age group the Federal Trade Commission says is the NO1 area, and of that group, the college ages, wow ,the biggest group.

There are three main reasons you say. The first one being that college age students are naive.

We are so trusting. Sign up for five credit cards makes me look like an adult. Never thinking about that, all this information is just being scarfed and something is going to happen to it. You have to be a little bit cynical to avoid identity theft. You have to be a little bit paranoid, a healthy level of paranoid is good and those of us sort of being beaten up a little bit older we kind of know that.

The second reason you say is because college age students get all those free offers in the mail for credit cards.

Well, they do, and they are dangerous, not only like that particular letter a lot of writers found, but also there up to 50 percent of them are getting one to six offers a week. And so you've got to dispose of these things properly. They just lay around in a pot with your junk mail. Someone comes along picks that thing up, fills it out for you, using your name but someone else’s address. Now we've got a mess on our hands.

And the third reason is you say that typically students don’t examine their financial records.

Yeah,here is an idea, balance your checkbook. And here is an idea, pull your credit bureau report. These aren't things I thought of when I was in college. But now you have to, in the environment that we live in today you've got to take a little bit of precaution. You gotta watch what you are doing. But if you're balancing your checkbook, you're opening your mail, you’re looking at what’s going on, you discover it. You have a credit card account that you didn’t open, then that’s a hint that you've got a problem going here.

  原文地址:http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/fangtanlu/44215.html