I recently received a forwarded email that has been circling the net for quite some time. The premise of the email is that if you are ever forced to withdraw money from an ATM by a thief you could enter your PIN in reverse order to summon the police. While such an idea has repeatedly been proposed, it hasn’t actually made its way into ATMs.

You can imagine the value of such a system. It would have marginal added cost, would allow transactions to continue, and offer the hope of rescue for victims. The main drawbacks often cited are that:

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To help protect myself against identity theft, I subscribe to a credit monitoring service for about $75 a year. The service grants unlimited review of my credit report, but the real value is the alerts that I can setup on my reports.

I have my service configured to alert me anytime there’s unusual activity in my credit reports. This includes applications for new credit, change of address, activity on dormant accounts, as well as balance changes on my revolving credit. It’s nice to get an email that says that my credit card bill jumped by a certain dollar amount or percent that I’ve setup. Then I can compare against my spending to see if it’s due to a purchase I made, or if something is awry.

There are other methods and services to guard your identity and credit report, but this is the one that I have found to be most useful with minimal cost or time investment.