Dealing with Fraud

Within the United State and within the world today, there is a great deal of fraud today. Fraud can take many different forms but it often comes as either identity fraud or credit card fraud. This article will deal with using your credit and dealing with fraud. This is such a common occurrence that you will have to deal with this at some point in your life and it is best to be prepared and to know what to do.

You have probably watched different specials which talk about how quickly stolen credit cards can be run up. This is true and it is often scary when you think about how this could happen to you. To protect you, your credit card company will have a fraud and investigations department. This department is very essential to help fight fraud and to help you in filing disputes. If you find transactions on your statement which are not yours, you will want to contact your credit card company immediately. The company will have a set procedure so that you can file a dispute against the charge as soon as possible.

This process can be tedious but it is essential as there are set standards as far as information to be gathered which is mandated by Visa, MasterCard, etc. The maximum which you should be out in the case of fraudulent activities is normally capped at fifty dollars. It may not even be this much but rather show up as zero. When you dispute charges on your credit card, you will not have to pay for these charges and there will be no finance charges on your statement for the disputed charges. Usually, you will have a place on your statement which lists disputed charges. Make sure to remain on top of this because there often is more information needed from the credit card companies to satisfy the standards set by Visa, MasterCard, etc.

The second part of this article on dealing with fraud is to check your credit report carefully. As a law, you are allowed a copy of your credit report once a year. With three different credit bureaus, one strategy is to get a copy from a different credit bureau every four months to verify that all of the information on the credit report is accurate. It has been estimated that there may be an error on one out of every four credit reports. Think about those odds and your lifespan of living. With those odds and the fact that you will have a credit report for at least fifty seven years (due to average age of life being seventy five and credit starting at eighteen), do you not think you stand a good chance of having wrong information on your credit report.

If you find wrong information on your credit report, you can dispute this information. There is a dispute process and the information to do this is found on the website listed above.

Hopefully, you have gained some information which will help you. You need to know what your options are because obstacles come up in your life. It is key to be able to handle these in stride.