Identity theft in SA booming
What is Identity Theft?
Identity theft is a common problem throughout the world and South Africa is no exception. Identity theft is defined as getting access to personal or financial information of persons for the purpose of assuming a persons identity to make fraudulent purchases or other transactions on the assumed persons name.
Identity theft can be committed in many ways. A few examples are; looking through bins for any bank account or credit card statements or accessing company databases in order to steal a list of stored customer information.
Having inaccurate information on your credit report, particularly negative information can seriously affect your ability to obtain credit when purchasing a home or financing a vehicle.
You may or may not be aware that every time you apply for credit and an inquiry is made on your credit report, it counts against you and reduces your credit score. Furthermore, alarm bells could well go off when a potential credit grantor sees multiple credit inquiries. In order to maintain a good credit profile and score, you want to keep these inquiries to a minimum.
Many people find themselves in a situation where their credit score has deteriorated and they have great difficulty obtaining any form of credit. Apart from the inconvenience of not having access to credit cards, personal loans or store accounts, bigger purchases such as vehicles or property will be virtually impossible.
One of the ironies about credit is that if you do not have any, it is difficult to get.
Make no doubt about it, unless you plant to live in a treehouse near the beach and live off the land for the rest of your life, you are going to need credit and you will want to have a good credit score. The better your score, the better your chances of getting credit and, in many cases, the better interest rate you will receive. A good score puts you in a stronger bargaining position with the credit provider as they will see you as a good payer and want to grant you credit.
There is no doubt that going under debt review will seriously affect your credit profile and reduce your score with the various credit bureaus. It is a long road to repair your credit score after debt review but it can be done.
