I was reading this interesting story on getrichslowly where this guy was mysteriously getting billed from Sprint even though he didn’t even have a Sprint account! Luckily, his mail was still getting forwarded from his old house which was where he was getting these bills even after 6 months (usually they stop doing that at 6 months). If he did not get these bills, he would have had a really bad mark on his credit history and accrued a lot of late payment fees.

From the article, I learned that you are entitled to 3 free credit reports a year. To obtain this, go to annualcreditreport.com. You’ll have to enter in your information, including your SSN. From the report you can find out if there’s any suspicious activity going on with your credit. Perhaps, someone has opened an account using your information and you don’t even know it. Or in the case of the previous article, someone is billing you and you are racking up an unknown debt! With the amount of identity fraud going on nowadays, it’s a very smart thing to do to look at your credit report 1-3 times a year. It’s easy and can save you a ton of headaches down the road. A lot of people don’t think it will happen to them, but I would say every other person I know has had some time of identity fraud done to them, including myself! It happens more than you think