Stolen/Lost Wallets and What to do.

We've all lost something over the years and it is really disappointing when it happens on vacation.

Some precautions to take before you lose your wallet/purse:

Have your credit card companies numbers saved on your phone under aliases so that you can cancel them as quickly as possible.

Have your credit card account numbers handy, possibly saved in the same way (you could also hide your card number as the last 4 digits of several different in order aliases).

Have as little in on your person as you can get away with. Don't have all your credit cards, if you can help it. Don't have a social security card if you don't need it. Don't keep hometown business cards in your wallet because the thief may be able to use the information in your wallet to contact that business as you.

What happens if you find a lost wallet?

You can turn it into the police, which can take a while since you probably aren't familiar with the area. Or you can drop the wallet into any USPS drop box and the US Postal Service will deliver back to the address on the ID inside.

Those are the things I've learned over the years.

Have any other tips to add?

We take photos of all our ID and cards- front and back and email them to ourselves on a web based email like gmail or Yahoo. Don't forget health insurance cards. That way no matter what happens, we can access them via any computer. If thieves or a big wave can get your wallet, they can get your phone as well.

We have and use money belts that go under our clothes to hold plane tix, passports, credit/debit cards. Don't put all your belongings in one place. When you go to the pool or beach, leave unnecessary valuables in the safe in the room.

Why would you travel with a SS card? It belongs in the home safe.

We split up some clothes in our suitcases. I have some of DW's in my carry on and she has some of mine in case one of us gets separated from a suitcase. We at least have a change or two of clothes. Before you travel call your credit and debit card providers and let them note when/where you are traveling so (a) your cards don't get shut down when you want to use them, and (b) other fraudulent charges can be guarded against. Say you are in Italy, and a charge comes in from Africa or San Francisco, it can be blocked.

Jim

I wouldn't recommend the post box at all. Not everyone who works at the post office is an upstanding citizen and it just provides more opportunity for ID theft. There is also no accountability of the wallet if you do that. I would give to a cop or perhaps the hotel manager if police are too far away.

Put a fraud alert on your credit with the credit bureaus is you lose something, and maybe even if you don't. Limits instant credit, which can be inconvenient at times but keeps the bad folks from getting instant credit in your name too.

Instead of putting all of your confidential information as contacts on your phone, it would be much better to put them in one of the readily available apps made for that purpose. Those apps can store your information securely by encrypting the information. In addition, most of them can sync "to the cloud" so you can access that information anywhere in the world. Even if you don't have a smart phone, several of these apps can be used via a PC / web access as well and provide the same secure access from the cloud when you are traveling.

Think about what would happen if your phone was stolen as well as your wallet -- IMO, never have confidential information unencrypted on your phone! Unlocking a phone can be trivial to an experienced hacker. A properly encrypted file is much more difficult to crack.

Kurt

Passepartout said:

We take photos of all our ID and cards- front and back and email them to ourselves on a web based email like gmail or Yahoo. Don't forget health insurance cards. That way no matter what happens, we can access them via any computer. If thieves or a big wave can get your wallet, they can get your phone as well.
Jim

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Email is not secure and is easily hacked. That's why financial institutions never use it for confidential mail. If you want to email yourself important information, put all the files into a password protected ZIP file or use some other method of encryption.

artringwald said:

If you want to email yourself important information, put all the files into a password protected ZIP file or use some other method of encryption.

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We do put our private stuff in encrypted files, but I didn't see the need to elaborate. Even sending it to your password protected email is better than having it on your phone!

I use an old school, low-tech approach, such as burying a list or photocopy of such information somewhere in my carry-on luggage. I avoid keeping it on any device (phone, camera, tablet, etc.) that is small and easy to steal. And I don't keep it in the cloud.

I'm a big computer/technology user, but I've seen too many demonstrations of how easy it is to hack email, passwords, encrypted files, etc.

if you are going to keep it in your email, be sure you dont title the email "credit card/wallet/financial information"

sure someone may crack my gmail account, but they will quickly move on when they see the 3000+ items in my inbox I save.

Passepartout said:

Don't forget health insurance cards.

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I had not thought of that. Thanks!

TUGBrian said:

sure someone may crack my gmail account, but they will quickly move on when they see the 3000+ items in my inbox I save.

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I'm not that familiar with gmail in particular, but with the right third-party tools, one can easily robo-search a database like that for "pattern" matches that might represent SS numbers (XXX-XX-XXXX), CC numbers (XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX), birthdates (XX/XX/XX), etc.

I don't recommend leaving such information in emails. But if one is inclined to do it, I would at least disguise the numbers by altering the format, adding a couple of digits, etc. As I understand it, most "hacking" is done by robo tools. It is not done by someone reading individual email messages one-by-one.

well yes, but those tools are merely for obtaining your login and password.

they would simply use the mail search tool built into gmail to search your emails for useful info.

mtwingcpa said:

I use an old school, low-tech approach, such as burying a list or photocopy of such information somewhere in my carry-on luggage. I avoid keeping it on any device (phone, camera, tablet, etc.) that is small and easy to steal. And I don't keep it in the cloud.

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If you think having that information printed on paper and "hidden" in your luggage is safer that having it properly encrypted on a device or online / in the cloud, then you are sadly mistaken. A proper encryption is next to impossible to crack; the security holes that make headlines are almost always due to some moron's actions (but that's not what makes the headlines, so most people don't hear about that).

Kurt

TUGBrian said:

if you are going to keep it in your email, be sure you dont title the email "credit card/wallet/financial information"

sure someone may crack my gmail account, but they will quickly move on when they see the 3000+ items in my inbox I save.

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The typical hack into a Gmail account (which is almost always due to weak / shared passwords) will be completely automated. Trust me -- a hacker would not take the time to manually log into your hacked account and visually browse your 3000+ emails. The hack would be completely automated: an application breaks into your account, scans/searches all your email via an API, collects what it thinks is interesting by using matching rules, and then is out of your account and on to the next. The whole thing would last a few seconds at most.

If they were hacking a Gmail account to send spam, they would just keep on sending it through that account until the emails fail to send (due to Google catching it, or password being changed), and then move onto the next hacked account. Again, no human interaction / manual browsing involved.

Kurt

PigsDad said:

If you think having that information printed on paper and "hidden" in your luggage is safer that having it properly encrypted on a device or online / in the cloud, then you are sadly mistaken.

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It's a question of RELATIVE risk. In my opinion, the theft of a carry-on bag (ripping it out of my hand or off of my shoulder) is far less likely than a pick-pocket lifting a wallet, phone or camera.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I don't think you are entitled to be so dismissive of my comments.

mtwingcpa said:

It's a question of RELATIVE risk. In my opinion, the theft of a carry-on bag (ripping it out of my hand or off of my shoulder) is far less likely than a pick-pocket lifting a wallet, phone or camera.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I don't think you are entitled to be so dismissive of my comments.

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If you lose EVERYTHING you travel with, for instance in a hotel fire, or bus wreck or happen to be awakened in your skivvies aboard the Costa Concordia as it's rolling onto it's side, you are better off to have emailed yourself encrypted copies of all your ID's, bankcards, insurance cards, front pages of passports, travelers cheque numbers if you still use those than anything you need to keep with you. If you keep these valuables- some would say necessities- encrypted and 'on the cloud' all you need is any computer, and your passwords.

I am certainly not dismissive of your comments, as I'm sure you are sincere. It's the practice of insisting on keeping irreplaceable valuables on you that I would challenge.

Jim

Passepartout said:

If you lose EVERYTHING you travel with, for instance in a hotel fire, or bus wreck or happen to be awakened in your skivvies aboard the Costa Concordia as it's rolling onto it's side, you are better off to have emailed yourself encrypted copies of all your ID's, bankcards, insurance cards, front pages of passports, travelers cheque numbers if you still use those than anything you need to keep with you.

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In my opinion you would be even better off if, in those circumstances, you had a relative you could call to retrieve the information, thereby not exposing it to hacking or theft in the first place. (Yes, I know, your relative could be hacked, but read on...)

As I said, in my opinion it is all a question of RELATIVE risk, and we might not all be comfortable with the same implementation. I offer my suggestions for what they're worth.

mtwingcpa said:

It's a question of RELATIVE risk. In my opinion, the theft of a carry-on bag (ripping it out of my hand or off of my shoulder) is far less likely than a pick-pocket lifting a wallet, phone or camera.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I don't think you are entitled to be so dismissive of my comments.

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Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as dismissing your comments. I work in the IT industry, specifically in the enterprise server space. We deal with banks, credit card companies and the like all the time, and we have to keep ourselves on top of the latest security measures in the industry. Heck, I just attended a security seminar less than a month ago. It is an ongoing need in my group to be on top of all the latest security threats, etc.

With that said, what I was trying to say is that perceived risk is often different than the real risk. For example, you can have information securely stored in the cloud or on a phone and it is often people's perception is that it is less secure than it really is. In this case, "old school" thinking is, in reality, "out of date" thinking. But unfortunately, because "shocking" stories of identity stealing, large companies having all user passwords "stolen", etc. sell well, the general public tend to think that anything online or on a phone is more vulnerable than "old school".

So in your example, it is true -- the risk of having your phone stolen is greater than having your carry-on bag stolen. But the risk of having your personal information stolen is actually higher if it is written on a piece of paper in your carry-on vs. stored properly on the phone or in the cloud.

Kurt

Great discussion and tips. I'm definitely looking into some of those apps discussed earlier and I will be taking this advice to heart during our next trip.

lost info

{/QUOTE}sure someone may crack my gmail account, but they will quickly move on when they see the 3000+ items in my inbox I save.[/QUOTE]

Actually, if someone thought there was something worth it in the account, even 10,000 saved emails are irrelevant. If you're good enough to hack into Gmail, then you already know how to use the internal search function. Add to that the easy availability of "robo-hack" softwware, and you've got a real problem.

There is no way to absolutely 100% safe. Reducing your risk is smart. Personally, I keep a high quality color copy of my passport in a separate place, but with me when I travel, and send to copies to 2 good friends who know where & when I'm traveling. The US State dept also recommends that you have a set of passport photos with you when you travel in case it must be replaced quickly. I do keep a list of my credit card companies and their phone #s. I don't write down the credit card #s themselves, you don't need it to call & cancel, the companies will look it up as they're asking you security info.

I send my info to myself as photos. It's unlikely that a data mining program is going to go through my photos to see if there is a picture of a card or passport. Sending them that way is easier, too, and you can still send them to yourself as attachment to a secure or encrypted email in a web-accessible program- like yahoo mail or gmail.

Probably not perfect, but safer than either carrying paper copies- even buried throughout your suitcases- or doing nothing.

Jim

Good idea keeping a picture of cards etc on your cell phone. I have Carbonite which backs up all my pictures to the Web and also can do a remote wipe of my phone if it gets stolen.

legalfee said:

Good idea keeping a picture of cards etc on your cell phone. I have Carbonite which backs up all my pictures to the Web and also can do a remote wipe of my phone if it gets stolen.

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I respectfully disagree with leaving those pictures on the phone. The phone can be stolen and those numbers compromised long before you can (a) realize the phone is gone and (2) initiate the process of wiping the data from it. Carbonite is a good idea, just remove the pictures of sensitive data from the phone and leave it on the cloud. That way after your phone is stolen, you can use your Carbonite password from the computer at the police station while you are filling out the report of the theft or loss. 'Apple picking' has reached almost epidemic proportions.

Jim

I do like the idea of taking photos and storing those in email though!