Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome aboard the Titanic II!

That's right folks, the global population are the passengers and crew of the Titanic II!  We are sailing on an ocean called Progress.  There are many hazards on this ocean, but I want to talk about a hazard known as the iceberg of identity theft.

An iceberg is actually a perfect symbol for identity theft.  You will understand perfectly in a moment but first a little history lesson.  We've all heard the story of the Titanic.  An unsinkable ship that was sunk by....an iceberg.  The number of people who lost their lives was unimaginable.  Many went down with the ship, others drowned or froze to death in the water and a lucky few managed to find a spot in one of the few lifeboats and survived.

Fast forward to today and us on our Titanic II.  We were happily sailing along the sea of progress, but now our ship is sinking.  What caused this damage to our ship?  The identity theft iceberg.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people standing on deck and pointing at this iceberg, or at least what they can see of it.  And they are saying "Look how small it is and how far away it is.  We don't have anything to worry about. "  However just like the original Titanic, the true danger lies beneath the surface where you don't see it. 

What the hundreds of thousands of souls are concentrating on is the financial aspect, bank accounts and credit cards.  Meanwhile below the surface lurks other less apparent forms of identity theft.  And that is what has breached our hull.  The smart people are looking for lifeboats.

These lifeboats take the form of different identity theft products.  Some are getting on the identity theft insurance lifeboat through homeowners insurance or other programs designed solely to protect their finances.  They have chosen the leaky lifeboats with oars.  These lifeboats are going to sink too!

Others have chosen identity restoration services.  These are the really smart people.  They realize that the iceberg is much bigger than it looks.  These life boats have motors to get them out of the way of the iceberg.  But what you should really want at this time is a rescue ship.  And that rescue ship has arrived with monitoring of all three major credit repositories.

Continuous credit monitoring, immediate notification of activity on your credit history and full identity restoration is what you want.  There are three major credit repositories and ALL of the information does not necessarily get included in ALL repositories.  So even though you are being monitored in one, derogatory information could be going into one of the other repositories.  The question is do you want to risk missing something by monitoring only one repository.