When you’re in love, you share everything: secrets, dreams, goals and desires. You also share your address, date of birth and — if you’re in a serious relationship — bank account information, credit cards and Social Security numbers.
While it may not seem risky when you’re starry-eyed in love, sharing your financial information and accounts can backfire after a bad breakup. In fact, a disgruntled ex could use your personal information against you in the future, destroying your credit score and costing you big bucks in the process.
[See: 7 Signs Your Romantic Partner Is Financially Unstable.]
Many people picture identity thieves as far-flung strangers, stealing credit card information from behind computer screens in distant countries. But, in actuality, identity theft and financial fraud are sometimes perpetrated by people we know — ex-roommates, unscrupulous family members and, yes, ex-spouses and ex-lovers.
In 2016, 780,000 people were victims of “familiar fraud” — fraud committed by someone the victim knows, says Kyle Marchini, an analyst for Javelin Strategy & Research, a financial research firm. While this six-figure number is just a drop in the bucket of overall fraud cases (about 5 percent), familiar fraud is likely underreported since it tends to be embarrassing for the victims, destroying their feelings of safety and trust. It’s also a more complex type of fraud to resolve, with victims of familiar fraud spending 17 hours on average resolving the issue, compared to seven hours for all fraud victims, Marchini says.
So, how do you protect yourself from the person you once trusted most in your life? There are a few steps you can take to make sure that your former lover doesn’t become your future financial nightmare. These strategies can help prevent your ex (or potential ex) from destroying your financial life.
[See: 10 Ways to Protect Yourself From Online Fraud.]
Be responsible when times are good. “We don’t enter relationships with the assumption that our soon-to-be-ex is going to take us to the cleaners,” says credit expert John Ulzheimer, who formerly worked with FICO and Equifax. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t protect yourself from bad actors, he says, even when your relationship is healthy.
No matter how in love you are, tend to your financial and credit health as an individual. Educating yourself about your own financial situation is key to advocating for yourself if your relationship ends.
Check your credit report from each of the three credit-reporting bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — once per year at annualcreditreport.com. Pay your bills on time and protect your online privacy, regularly changing passwords or using a password manager to lock up your accounts.
Understand what debt you own as an individual, and what debt you hold with your spouse or partner, and who’s responsible for which payments. If you’re especially concerned, consider formalizing some kind of agreement about who will tackle which shared debt if you split. “You can always have a financial agreement between the two of you,” says Lili Vasileff, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based fee-only certified financial planner, specializing in divorce and wealth protection management. “Depending on your romantic status, it might even be a prenup.”
Get notifications of suspicious activity by setting up financial alerts through multiple channels, Marchini says. Automate bank, credit card and debt notifications on email, text and through smartphone apps for a heads-up whenever there’s a new login to your account or a password change. That way, even if your ex has control of one device — say, your laptop — you can still see alerts about suspicious activity on your phone and email. “The more hurdles [your ex has] to jump through, the more chances they have to have second thoughts on whether or not they can actually go through with [the fraud],” Marchini says.
Keep in mind that you don’t really ever have to share your financial life if you’re uncomfortable doing so, Ulzheimer says. “The only time you need to commingle finances is if you need two incomes to qualify for a loan [such as a mortgage],” he says.
[Read: How Consumers Can Protect Their Online Privacy Right Now.]
Protect yourself when times are bad. If you suspect that your sweetie has become a swindler, then take steps to safeguard your accounts after your breakup. During the course of the split, you’ll need to unlink accounts, close shared credit cards and cancel shared utility and cell phone accounts, removing your ex as an authorized user on any other accounts. Get records of these major account changes and monitor activity on them until the dust settles after the breakup.
The process and difficulty involved in unlinking will depend on which kinds of accounts you share — for example, taking an authorized user off a credit card is far easier than removing an ex from a shared mortgage — and many couples run into issues during a breakup when one partner simply refuses to continue paying a shared debt obligation, tanking the ex-spouse’s credit in the process, Vasileff says. Remedying this may involve taking legal action, such as suing your ex under the divorce agreement, she says.
If you suspect that your ex may take financial revenge, monitor your credit reports regularly and consider enrolling in a credit-monitoring service. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for unfamiliar bills, such as strange credit card or student loan bills arriving at your house, or any other unexplained financial activity. Those can be red flags that something is amiss.
If your credit is dinged because of your ex’s malicious actions, such as fraudulently taking out debt in your name, you’ll need to report the fraud to the creditor and dispute the black mark on your credit report with the credit-reporting bureaus. You can also place a fraud alert message on your credit file and “freeze” your credit to ensure that no new accounts are opened in your name, says Heather Battison, vice president at credit information company TransUnion. Consider filing an Identity Theft Report with the Federal Trade Commission to beef up your dispute documentation, Ulzheimer says.
You may also need to file a police report to get your creditors and credit-reporting bureaus to prioritize your dispute. The police report “is documentation that this is serious and this is something that happened,” Battison says. This step can be especially traumatizing, Ulzheimer says, since exes are “going to have to rat out their ex-spouse.” But it may be necessary to get your financial life back on track.
More from U.S. News
8 Easy Ways to Organize Your Financial Life
How to Keep Your Ex From Destroying Your Credit originally appeared on usnews.com
