With each of the three major credit reporting bureaus. This ensures that your client’s personal credit cannot be accessed by anyone who doesn’t have their personal PIN number, which is assigned when they freeze their credit. If their personal information is ever stolen, it will not be able to be used to open new credit cards or fraudulent loans. 

If your client’s login ID and password are stolen, secondary verification can keep hackers from accessing their account. Less than 1 percent of people use secondary verification even though it’s the No. 1 way to protect yourself from hackers.

Do not use this same device for email, search, web surfing, social media and shopping.

Malware delivered via email and in online advertising is a common tool used by hackers to gather keystrokes which provide them with login IDs and passwords. If your clients never use email or web surf on the device that is dedicated to their credit card, bank, brokerage and other financial accounts, hackers can’t gather their login IDs and passwords via an email hack.

Sophisticated syndicates use social media to gather information on wealthy individuals. They look for ways to access their social networks and to gain access. Be sure that your clients’ privacy settings limit who can see their posts, and be sure that the privacy settings on their children’s accounts are also set to limit access. Remind them to turn off the “location settings” while posting pictures on vacation. 

If your client is not certain that a Wi-Fi network is secure, they should not use it to access their financial accounts, and only use it for email if they’re using an encrypted link.

So that clients are aware of ALL activity on their credit and debit cards, wherever possible, establish text alerts to their mobile phones for all charges exceeding $0.01. 

Clients should always contact the financial institution that provided them with wiring instruction by phone to reverify the instructions they received by email. And, before the wire is released, be sure that the financial institution reconfirms the final instructions with your client by phone. Sophisticated fraud syndicates that secure access to an email account will wait for an opportunity to change wiring instructions. This type of fraud is called “man in the middle,” and it has become rampant. Billions of dollars are being stolen using this technique. The only way to stop this type of fraud is to reverify the wiring instructions by phone.