In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, shares practical strategies for protecting yourself from identity theft. From freezing your credit to creating stronger passwords and monitoring your accounts regularly, Darryl walks through clear, actionable steps you can take to help reduce the risk of fraud.
Along the way, Darryl highlights real-life examples and common scams, helping you stay aware and proactive in safeguarding your finances.
Show highlights include:
• Three preventative measures to help reduce the likelihood of ID theft.
• How freezing your credit works and when to consider it.
• Tips for creating stronger, harder-to-guess passwords.
• Why two-factor authentication can add an extra layer of protection.
• Key steps to take immediately if you experience fraud.
• Resources like identitytheft.gov and credit bureau fraud alerts.
Whether you’re looking to better protect yourself, help a loved one, or simply stay informed, this episode offers valuable insight into minimizing the impact of fraud and keeping your personal information more secure.
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO, Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. Building wealth comes with clarity, purpose and peace. Peace. PAX is Latin for peace. And we’re guided by 1 Timothy [6:17] through 19. Please read that scripture, but this scripture will help you as we attempt to guide you to grow your net worth without losing your grounding.
And if that’s what you’re after, then you’re absolutely at the right podcast. So, when I speak to a lot of Christians, you may or may not be a Christian, but Christians tend to be a target for fraud. Oftentimes crooks in the church. I did a whole podcast episode series called The Dark Side of Finance, where I uncovered ten situations in which fraud had destroyed lives.
So, if you want to unpack the dark side of finance, you can find that on really iTunes or any other platform. I’m going to touch on some elements of fraud today, namely in the area of ID theft. It’s such a big business. It’s huge. There’re international operations in Eastern Europe, Eastern Asia. I mean, really everywhere for that matter.
As far as I know, those are the places that I think about, that I’ve read about where there’s actual buildings full of people that that’s what they do. It’s just a business now is to steal money from you. I mean, there’s so many people trying to steal money from you. So, I need to give you a heads up on some things that you can do to get in front of this.
So, the way I want to break down this conversation is I want to talk about three things you can do to prevent ID theft and three things you can do if you’re a victim. So, let’s just kind of go through these. It shouldn’t take too long, but it’s very, very important that you stay alert.
So here we go. Number one, if you do, I’m sorry. Let me start with the prevent. To prevent ID theft, one thing you could do if you want is freeze your credit. It doesn’t cost you anything to freeze your credit. You just go online and go to all three credit bureaus and request a freeze. The challenge with doing that, is like putting a padlock on your mailbox.
But the challenge is, if you’re going to apply for something, you have got to unfreeze it. That takes about 20 minutes. But if you’re not applying for a lot of credit right now, it is a way to prevent people from stealing from you won’t completely prevent it, but it does, minimize it. Just as an example, there’s this lady named Angela.
She’s a retired teacher in Boerne, and she had her social security number leaked in this data breach. You know how you’ve heard of, you know, Target or whoever else? Target was one that I thought of. Maybe AT&T. There was another one recently. You hear it all the time now. At first when you first heard it, we freaked out about data breaches.
Now it’s so common that, you know, most you don’t even think about anymore. But, data breaches happened, and she had her Social Security number leaked through this data breach. Again, she didn’t think of it that much until somebody tried to open an account at Home Depot in her name. But this is good. She had learned, she had attended this financial seminar on credit fraud.
So, she had frozen her credit, they couldn’t open the card at Home Depot. And so, her quote was, this was the best five minutes and not five minutes, 30 minutes she had ever spent on just this webinar. So, if you’re not using your credit, freezing it is something to consider. The second thing you can do to prevent, or at least I don’t want to mislead you.
Minimize the probability of an ID theft is using strong passwords. Password123 is not a strong password. Password. 12345. You know, don’t use, like, don’t even use your house, your car. I’m sorry. Your address. Social Security number or date of birth, you know, try to avoid all those things.
Those are just, like, easy ones for a con artist. Because the reality is, is all your information is on the web, like, I mean, I can even figure out your Social Security number, I mean, or anything. Your voting record, it’s all out there. Like it or not, it’s out there. So don’t use information that’s made available to the public.
You know, use stuff that’s random to you. Like the third pet you had when you were a child or something really, really random, your least favorite sports team. I don’t know. Jason, he is a nurse in San Antonio. He used Jason1980 for everything. And then his email got hacked. And the hacker just plugged Jason1980 into every platform.
And which was the first platform he started with, Amazon. I’m going to go to Amazon and put in Jason 1980 the hackers like oh it works. Not surprised. I’m going to go ahead and get some gift cards. I’ll get $3,000 in gift cards. And so, Jason. You know, he was $3,000 poorer. So, you have got to use, you can use some of these password authenticators.
I don’t use one personally. I just, they’re clunky to me, but other people love them. But two factor authentication, meaning that you get a little text. And they had these authenticators. Now, you may or may not be used to them, but they, you go into this little other app and they ask what number popped up on this app.
So, there’s different ways that institutions are putting boundaries on ensuring that it’s you. The two-factor authentication is one of them. So, you know, make sure that you’re using strong passwords, two factor authentication. And you know, these password services like one password is password managers. You can consider that again I know some people that love them okay.
Third thing that you could do is just monitor your financial accounts weekly. I would say, some people do it daily but don’t do monthly. I, you know, look at your stuff weekly and you’ve heard me talk about investment performance. You shouldn’t be looking at the performance numbers weekly. It’s too frequent and it’ll freak you out.
But you can just, you know, check contributions, distributions, making sure that there’s nothing funny there. Certainly, on your banking accounts. Cashing it first can make a big difference. There is a widow. Her name was Maria and I, by the way, I did change the names of all these people because. And so, it just coincidentally feels like it’s you.
It’s not, but a widow in New Braunfels. She spotted two $400 charges at a California gas station. And she was just kind of scrolling while she was at a coffee shop, and she reported it right away. So, apparently, they did this skimming scam. And so, she just, she just now has a habit of always checking her credit every Sunday.
So be sure to just check your stuff. I like, and I mentioned this before, I like Monarch Money as a way to do that. A lot of people used to use Mint. There’re a few other tools coming out. FaithFi is one that a lot of Christians like to use because, it’s a money tracking tool.
But also there’s some scripture along the ways that it’s encouraging. So, Monarch Money, FaithFi and then, you know, Dave Ramsey has a tool that’s out there, I’m sure it’s improved when I first looked at it, there was some clunkiness, but I haven’t looked at in a long time.
But just using some of those tools that consolidate data might be easy for you. And then like Maria, just do it like once a week, maybe Sunday or Saturday. I personally do mine on Sunday evening. Okay. So, what do you do if you do become a victim of ID theft. So, first things first, is you got to contact the Federal Trade Commission.
And this creates an official paper trail and launches a recovery plan. If you, if it’s pretty significant, you’re going to want to file a police report. There is a guy out of Fredericksburg. He got a letter from the IRS about a tax return he never filed, so he reported it to this website. Identitytheft.gov.
So that’s where you would go. And they gave him a recovery plan. And he filed a fraud affidavit. And now he has this special Pin number to file taxes each year so that, you know, that doesn’t happen again, but they will create a personalized strategy to ensure that you’re protected on to go forward again that websites identitytheft.gov.
The second thing you need to do if you have been hacked is contact the credit bureaus. And as an example, you know, you have Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. They will place a fraud alert, for one year. If you filed a police report or a Federal Trade Commission report, you can get a, like a seven-year extended alert on these credit bureaus.
They very likely just to let you know, I mean, again, I haven’t looked at it in a while, they very likely may up charge you for, like, protection plans. You don’t need that. You can look at it and certainly take inventory of it, but there is a free credit monitoring service. There’s a lady named Linda.
She’s retired military. She saw $9000 credit card bill pop up on her report. So, she called all three bureaus, filed a fraud report. They froze her credit. And so, she disputed the account, and it got removed within 30 days. So, you know, what’s good about a lot of these financial institutions is they don’t mess around now.
They hustle. They have a recovery process. And so just making sure you notify them quickly. The last thing to do is just close these fraudulent accounts. And like I said, dispute them right away. And you know, the idea is, is that you’ve got to hustle. You’ve got to, you know, closing some of these accounts is probably, it is a good step.
But I also understand that you probably have some other drafts that go in those same accounts. So, you’ve got to just make sure you don’t forget about those other drafts, but definitely, alert the Federal Trade Commission right away, file a police report. Just act swiftly is what I’m trying to say. Okay, those are all kind of the basic framework in fraud.
I’m just telling you it’s happening all the time. And especially as you get older and your parents and your grandparents get older, they are going to be targets, huge targets. Charles Schwab, who’s a custodian for a lot of our clients’ money, provided us to report, and some of the things that they said, I’ll go through that list because I think it’s helpful.
They said if you feel that there’s fraudulent information or fraudulent activity, call your advisor, and we would want you to call your financial advisor. So, we, if you were to tell us and we kind of, financial advisors’ kind of are looking for suspicious people. I actually worked at a bank in college, and so I was in the teller line.
So, I was trained to look for suspicious activity all the time. And so, I think that’s kind of a part of our culture is to kind of look for things, but call your advisor and say, hey, look, I feel like there might be something going on. Just be on the lookout. And you can also, if you want to, I mean, I want you to call your advisor and call PAX.
You can also call Schwab directly. That number is 1-800 515 2157. They have a fraud prevention and investigation team there too; I’d call Social Security. That’s one thing to consider. Like I said, identitytheft.gov is important. If there’s tax fraud, get in touch with the IRS. I would double-check, this is something Schwab recommends and I would agree.
Your spyware, your virus, your anti-malware software, making sure it’s reputable. Check if you don’t have it, you need to download it. But you want to make sure you double check that, if there has been fraud, in fact, you need to get that now. Keep all evidence of any compromises. You’ll need those for your records, for any recovery.
Review your statements, you know, go online and look at your statements. And then also I think, tell your friends, because what will happen is if they’ve hacked into, you know, hack in your email distribution list and send a request to all your contacts. And you might have a sister-in-law or brother-in-law that says, oh, yeah, you need money, I’ll send you money.
And so, then they’re hacking into a lot of other people in your network. So, tell your friends, hey, I got hacked. If you get anything fishy, let me know. Most of us have experienced it once. A long time ago, I got hacked. This was probably gosh, 20 years ago. And it was really early in the game.
And so, this lady, I don’t even really even know her that well. She responded to one of my emails and then she got hacked and she was so mad at me, I was like, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t know what to do. This was early in the game, but she was livid. I was, and so, I’ll never forget that.
Just sorry, whoever that was, I haven’t made that mistake again. And I pray I don’t, I’m very careful with opening emails. And that’s another thing you can do to prevent this from happening. But main point is make sure you tell your friends and then of course, after all this is settled, go, you know, every three months or six months, go in and check, making sure there’s nothing going on.
One of the things I didn’t get a chance to cover, I did allude to it in The Dark Side of Finance podcast. I almost forgot the name of my own podcast, The Dark Side of Finance podcast. Some of the scams that are out there are beyond the scope of this. And I’m going to put a guide on our website because you want to look at some of these scams that are out there.
They’re crazy sophisticated. Now there’s actors involved and artificial intelligence. It’s insane. But I’m going to put a little prevention guide on our website. So, if you want to download that might be good for you. It’ll talk about romance scams, lotto scams, government impersonators, tech support scams. I don’t know how many Apple support scams I get via text, real estate scams.
I know somebody that got their title stolen. It’s just crazy, email compromise. And of course there’s investments scam. So, I’ll put a little summary on the website there, for you to check out. And then if you want to go deeper, you can check out The Dark Side of Finance. Those stories are really interesting and kind of disturbing.
So, lots to say about this, but I really need you to be on point. I need you to have your head on a swivel, and I need you to make sure you’re looking out for bad guys, because they’re all around us now. They’re focused on you. And specifically, if you’re 60-65 plus you’ve got a big target on your back.
So, keep your head on a swivel. Thanks for listening to Retire in Texas. Remember, stay grounded, live generously, and remember you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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