There are two kinds of fraud alerts.

An initial fraud alert which stays on your credit report for at least 90 days. And An extended fraud alert which stays on your credit report for seven years.

It is so easy to have your Facebook, Gmail, yahoo or Orkut accounts hacked. It is so easy that there are now services offering to do it for free for you for thirty days. We won’t give you a link to the hacking website, but it is real. To limit your risk always use a different password for each account and change them often. An easy way to remember different passwords is to memorize a complex password by using the first letter of each word in a phrase and then adding the number of words in the phrase as the first letter of the password and add a -Y for yahoo, -FB for facebook, etc. Here is an example:

“you are my sunshine my only sunshine” would generate the password for yahoo “7yamsmos-Y”.

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