Identity-theft victims of Reddit, is there anything you could have done differently to prevent it from happening? What did you learn from your experience?

Keep one primary bank account to deposit your checks into, and a separate one for shopping and daily use. If the daily use one gets hacked and you’re $5K overdrawn, at least you’ll have some money coming in case your secondary bank drags their feet in paying you back. When it happened to me, my only source of income was via direct deposit from a federal pension, and the attack was sophisticated enough that it took me months to prove to my bank that I wasn’t the actor in the fraud and to restore my funds, meanwhile whatever paychecks I kept receiving were only filling in that $5,000 void. Usually it takes a month or two to be able to change where those checks are sent. If I didn’t have good friends, I might have been out on the streets due to that nightmare.

/r/AskReddit Thread