Three tips to avoid identity theft when traveling

It’s easy to find yourself the victim of a travel scam. With the summer travel season fast approaching, it’s a time that offers identity thieves the perfect opportunity to make money at your expense.

Here are three quick tips on how to avoid becoming the victim of identity thieves that prey on travelers. Two of these tips won’t cost you a dime, the third involves buying something you’d have to buy at some point anyway—a wallet.

Credit card theft

Credit card theft costs consumers hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Your credit card provider invests heavily in stopping card theft at the earliest possible opportunity, but you can take one step to greatly reduce your odds of becoming a victim.

Call the fraud department of your credit card provider before leaving on a trip. We recently went on a trip to Hawaii and we called the card company before we left so that they would know the “unusual” charges they would be seeing were ours. It also put them on alert that if charges started appearing in other locations, those charges would not be from us.

Stop the mail

Before we leave on a trip, we always make sure to either stop the mail or have a neighbor pick it up. Stopping your mail with the US Postal Service can be done quickly and easily online at usps.com/holdmail. Remember that having your mail held isn’t a perfect insurance policy. Many years ago, we ordered checks before a vacation, had our mail held—and our checks stolen from inside the local post office by a temporary employee. So, be careful what you order before you leave and avoid having something valuable delivered while you’re away.

An RFID-blocking wallet

What is RFID? The acronym stands for Radio Frequency Identification. And your credit card may have an RFID chip, which makes it possible for identity thieves to scan your credit card numbers without ever touching your credit card.

Identity thieves are continually improving their techniques. And while it’s comforting to know that these people are determined to improve their skill set and upgrade their equipment, it’s not comforting to know that they’re also determined to make their money at your expense, not their own. Therefore, the easiest way to stop them in their tracks would be an identity-safe wallet.  There are plenty of places online to buy an RFID-blocking wallet for around $30.00.