Erik Makela

How to Not Commit Identity Fraud

What are the pieces of information that someone needs to steal your identity? As someone who has opened over 40 bank and credit card accounts (in my own name) and has had hundreds of calls with customer service representative - I have essentially memorized my personal. Through this process I’ve also come to realize how easy the process of identity fraud actually is. This post is meant to inform you of what those factors are and how to protect yourself.

What is actually needed to open a bank or credit account?

  • First Name - Easy to obtain [Verified over soft credit inquiry]
  • Middle Name - Not required in most cases
  • Last Name - Easy to obtain [Verified over soft credit inquiry]
  • Primary Address - Easy to obtain [Verified over soft credit inquiry]
  • Phone Number - Easy to obtain (doesn’t even have to be your phone number)
  • Email Address - Easy to obtain (doesn’t even have to be your phone email)
  • Date of Birth - Medium to obtain [Verified over soft credit inquiry]
  • Driver’s License or Proof of Citizenship - Hard to obtain [Verified through third party]
  • Social Security Number - Hard to obtain [Verified over soft credit inquiry]

The main factors you need to protect are your driver’s license number, social, security and date of birth. Everything is reality easy to find, lookup, or fake in most cases

How to protect yourself?

1. Bank security measures

  • Soft credit inquiry - used to prevent surface level attack of information mismatch
  • Over the phone calls - mostly redundant unless voice identity verification or a phone code is used
  • Over email - nonexistent
  • During Signup - Highly effect, these are questions that ask tangential information such as “which address had your grandmother been associated with”
  • 2-Facor-Authenication verification - Highly effective

2. FREEZE YOUR REPORTING ACCOUNTS - this is the end all be all of an account being opened or not

Any other finance advise mystery man on the internet?

  • Get a financial advisor
  • Or define your financial goals (such as Ramit Sethi)

Guide to Organization and Productivity

I made a PowerPoint for my school last to help introduce some of the principals of productivity. I am going to summarize what I think are the most important elements of productivity and why most of the books out there, while useful, may or may not waste your time since each person’s definition is different for how to be organized.

The inspirations for this post: “Atomic Habits” James Clear, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen R. Covey, Nathanial Drew YouTube, Matt D’Avella YouTube, Tiago Forte, Better Ideas YouTube.

What are the aspects of productivity?

  • Time
  • The Zone / Flow State
  • Information Collection
  • Habits
  • Information
  • Information Organization, File Organization

Time - Always be aware of what you are doing with your time

  • Keep a calendar and have a to-do list. The items on the list should be delegated to a point in time.
  • Keep in mind the 80/20 rule. What 20% of your time and effort is going to yield 80% of the results.
  • Productivity and life is a marathon. Consistency is more important than the rate of output. Burnout is what you’re trying to avoid.

The Zone / Flow State - How are you managing your attention? If you want to get something done, what is distracting you from doing it?

  • Batch email/notification processing and automations
  • Eliminating all non-essential communication (such as spam emails)
  • No multitasking except music

Information Collection - Are you aware of what information you are consuming?

  • Disinformation, Deepfakes, and Bots post are all part of the modern internet. Make you sure are aware of what is a distraction and what is not.
  • Keep in mind a Signal to Noise Ratio. Realistically, how are you going to keep up if you’re subscribed to 500 newsletters, Podcast, or YouTube Channels. If you’re within the gaming community this should be readily obvious from your Steam Library Backlog.
  • Remember that test taking strategies also work for comprehension of ideas - Notes, Underlining, identifying fluff, context clues

Habits - Not Procrastination - How are you keeping a Rhythm in your life?

  • (Examples of habit building are pulled from Atomic Habits)
  • Make it obvious - if you want to eat healthier, put an apple on your counter in plain sight instead of a cookie
  • Make it attractive - having an accountability buddy
  • Make it easy - Write down what you want to get done the night before
  • Make it satisfying - positive reinforcement mechanism

Information Organization - How are you organizing the things you collect?

  • Have a unified storage system - platforms are the enemy, simplicity is key (When you think about searching for a file, is everything in one place such a Dropbox. Instead of files being spread across Icloud, Gdrive, Dropbox)
  • 3/2/1 method for data backup = Three data copies, Two types of storage, One offsite backup - losing data is much more costly than unorganized data

File Organization - How are you files organized?

  • Identify current weak points - “What exactly is in my ‘other documents’
  • 1% Rule and the compound effect - If you reduce the time to find a file from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Imagine the time you save over the course of your life.
  • File Naming Systems - Becoming your own librarian
  • Really Long Descriptions “Medical Bill from Hospital for the Broken Hand from Falling Off My Bike”
  • Class Codes / Short Hands - FUN 432, ACCT 201, ACCT 311, ACCT 425
  • Dates - YYYY_MM_DD - 2024_09_05 File XYZ
  • Johnny Decimal System (https://johnnydecimal.com/) - Call sign for every file. “Business Development” > 16.02 “sixteen oh-two”

Other Advice and Consideration

  • Have a mobile/online/web version of everything, so you can do anything from anywhere
  • Health: get sleep, hydrate, eat good, meditation & stress management
  • SMART Goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound
  • Management = Delegation, Leadership = Unifying efforts and goals
  • Have some way to track your online time - ActivityWatch - Open-Source Time Tracker
  • Learn Keyboard Shortcuts on your computer

Why Lie?

Say you were an expert of ice cream detection. Look at this bowl of chocolate ice-cream and say “that’s vanilla ice-cream”. Does it make sense? No. Is it easy to say? Yes. Now say you want to lie about every color of ice cream in the ice cream shop. Do you remember what you called the chocolate ice cream? The vanilla ice cream? The mint ice cream?

Over time other people are going to detect that you are lying and have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to ice cream flavors. It’s going to take more and more mental effort for you to keep track when you have lied about a specific ice cream flavor and why.

Everyone lies to some extent to another and that’s where the term “little white lie” comes from, because sometimes it’s easier to tell the truth than to not tell the truth. However, by not telling the true you are emotionally taxing yourself over time by creating a world in which you are unable to express what is true. And when tell the truth cost you? You are living in a world where you are trying to cover your tracks and one in which the consequence to your actions are not actualized. By lying you are living in a fantasy.

Why lie? Because if you do, you don’t grow and are unable to show who you truly are.