The definitions vary but generally, identity theft is described as "Obtaining or using someone's personal information without their consent or in a fraudulent manner for economic gain or other purposes."

Your personal information includes your name, date of birth, address, social insurance number, credit card number and any other means of identifying you. Although credit and debit card fraud are the most common form of identity theft, the threat is much broader from using your phone number to make unauthorized long distance calls to opening bank, Internet or mortgage accounts in your name and not paying the bills.

Restoring your identity and credit rating can take months or even years and cost you thousands of dollars. Protecting yourself against ID theft begins with knowledge of how it happens, how to prevent it, and how to deal with it if you do become a victim.

Yes. The information provided on the site is general in nature and not geared to your specific situation. Our trained specialists can ask the questions required to provide information specific to your needs.

Yes. Licensed investigators will assist in confirming that identity theft has actually occurred.

You will be speaking with a trained professional who will conduct a brief telephone interview to determine the details of your particular situation. From there we will connect you with a licensed investigator who will be your personal contact throughout the case.

Restoring your affairs to their proper state is a complex and time consuming process. At your option, IDefence investigators will take the lead through the entire process, representing you where possible with outside parties such as credit agencies and creditors. They will also collect the paperwork that needs to be completed and answer any questions you may have in this regard. In short, they will save you time while providing the peace of mind that comes with knowing this critical process is being handled properly.

IDefence Card Monitoring uses advanced proprietary technology to scan billions of Internet records in real-time. If any of your registered debit or credit card numbers are discovered, you will be notified via email within 24 hours.

To sign up, you're going to need the Access Code that was provided as part of your cheque package. This Access Code will be used one time, during the original sign up process. Once you've signed up, you'll be able to register up to 10 credit or debit cards for the service.

You'll be able to register up to 10 debit or credit cards.

For credit cards, we only ask for the 16 digits not the expiration date OR the security number (CCN number) on the back of the card. Without this information no one can use your card. The same holds true for debit cards. We only ask for your card number and not your PIN. We are simply monitoring the card numbers.

We take two important measures to protect your information:

• Customer information is stored on a secure server that is firewall-protected and encrypted to block unauthorized third party access.
• We also restrict downloading of any data on our secure servers to unsecured locations, such as a laptop. Our site is encrypted and protected with industry-standard SSL encryption software. Our site is also certified and regularly scanned by ControlScan to protect against hacker attacks for over 11,500 known website security vulnerabilities. All sensitive information is encrypted prior to storing it in our databases.

If one of your registered card numbers is discovered, an email notification will be sent to you within 24 hours and we will also attempt to contact you by phone. Please note that the email notification/phone call will be made based on the information in your profile. It is important to keep this information up-to-date.

In addition to receiving an email notification, we will attempt to phone you directly to provide details of the compromised card and to determine whether or not further action needs to be taken. If we miss you, we'll leave a phone number for you to call us back.

When you login to your personal account on the IDefence Card Monitoring website, you can check the status of each of your registered cards by clicking on the "Status" button. Look for the status indicator in the left hand column of each card you registered. If the status indicator shows "active" then we are monitoring that card number. If the status indicator shows "inactive" you can change to "active" by click the button marked "enable". To change the status from "active" to inactive, click the button marked "disable".

Actually, once you have entered the information you would like us to monitor, you do not need to login unless you want to update your card numbers or contact information. If any of your registered card numbers appear to be compromised, we will automatically contact you.

Visit our Resource Centre where you'll find information and tips on things you can to do safeguard your identity along with useful links.