I first informed you about the US Postal Service’s Informed delivery Program in the Scam of the day for April 16, 2017 when the program first began. Under this program, you can sign up for a free service of the U.S. Postal Service that will send you an email each morning with images of the mail you will be receiving later that day.  This service was first done on a pilot basis in 2014 in parts of California, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. and became available to everyone last year. Identity theft through the stealing of mail such as credit card statements and bank statements from your mailbox is a significant problem and this new program both alerts you as to when to look for important mail, as well as let you know if such important mail has been stolen from your mailbox so you can respond more quickly. However, as Gigi Fotieo of Florida learned, the program can also be exploited by criminals, who in her case signed up for the program in her name and were able to see when her credit card statement would be coming in the mail so that they knew when to steal the statement from her mail box and gain access to her credit cards as well as sign her up for additional cards which they also exploited. While in order to set up an account, you need to answer security questions, the information necessary to answer those questions can often be readily obtained online.
TIPS
The best way to avoid this problem is to sign up for the Informed Delivery Program before an identity thief does so in your name.  Here is the link to go to sign up. https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.action
It is also important to note that if you do sign up for the service, you should use a unique and complex password to prevent identity thieves from hacking your account to let them know when important mail that they can exploit for identity theft purposes will be arriving to your home.
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