How Worried Do I Need To Be About Identity Theft?

If you are still with me on this Identity Theft thread, than you are wanting to know the answer to Question #2: Consumers can prevent criminals from accessing their bank accounts by not writing down their personal identification numbers (PINs). True or false? The answer to question No. 2 is also "false." You don't want to write down your PIN, of course, but keeping it a secret won't necessarily protect your account. Monitoring all your accounts is important, but these days you want to pay particular attention to what's going on in your checking and savings accounts, because thieves increasingly target bank accounts. The bad guys have found plenty of ways to steal all-important PINs. Some set up bogus ATMs or install skimming devices or cameras on legitimate machines to record account numbers and PINs. A few may even have cracked the "holy grail" of bank-account hacking by stealing and decoding encrypted PINs from a retailer's database. Avoid unfamiliar ATMs; consider using your credit card instead of your debit card for transactions; monitor your bank transactions at least once a week and question any unfamiliar charges. If your accounts have been compromised, shut them down and open new ones. The bank may resist, but once the bad guys have access to your account, there's really no foolproof way to keep them out, except by shutting it down and starting with a new account number.
*Source:Liz Pulliam Weston, http://www.moneycentral.msn.com/