LA Times assistant editor Jessica Roy experienced identity theft in 2019, upending her life. She joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today” to share tips on how to prevent identity theft from happening to you. 

Roy’s wallet was stolen out of her purse. For the next several months, thieves used her driver’s license and fraudulent accounts to go on spending sprees in her name. She shared how people can prevent something similar from happening to them.

“Never carry your Social Security card in your wallet. There’s no reason it needs to be in your wallet with you. If you lose your wallet and that information is misplaced, you should try to report the wallet stolen right away. The police are going to be kind of reluctant to take that report because they’re not going to dedicate a lot of resources to investigating a stolen wallet. But you need that as evidence to help mount your case, to defend your innocence,” Roy said.

Roy also recommends proactively freezing your credit, which is free to anyone. That way, thieves cannot open lines of credit in your name.  

“Certainly, you want to keep an eye on transactions, you want to cancel those cards. If you have autopay set up for any of your bills, get that changed over to whatever the new number is. But the bank will make you whole. You cannot be held accountable for those fraudulent transactions, but the sooner you contact them about it, the faster it’ll all get resolved,” she shared. 

Roy turned to the Identity Theft Resource Center as a helpful tool when trying to reclaim her identity. There are several ways people can protect themselves from identity theft before anyone steals their information. 

“All of your personal information is probably online because of all the data breaches that have happened over the last couple of decades. Anybody can proactively freeze their credit. That takes like 15 minutes to do. It’s free, and any time you are applying for credit for a mortgage, auto loan or whatever, it’s also very easy to temporarily unfreeze and then refreeze it again,” she said. “The people who stole my identity tried very hard to access both my bank accounts and my email account… They were never able to because I had two factor authentication and unique passwords for everything.” 

Keeping sensitive information and clues to private security questions from social media is another way to prevent thieves from gaining access to your accounts.

Watch the full interview above. 

Watch “LA Times Today” at 7 and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday on Spectrum News 1 and the Spectrum News app.