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Short and Sweet

By Rob Lambert - Email Editor

Date: 24-Nov-2005

I’ll keep this short and sweet; after all, IT’S THANKSGIVING!!!

You have a record. Anybody wanting to know who owns a particular property, who has a business license, or who has a lawsuit brought against them can visit one of the many Internet sites which search public records. These online services are capable of instantaneously searching hundreds of millions of public records and quickly giving you the results.

That’s the good news; here’s the bad news. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Four years ago an “investigator” was trying to get a large job from one of my clients. I was the gatekeeper in this case. Trying to impress me, he asked me to give him an hour so he could show me his tricks. Wow! In less than an hour he was back to me with my social security number, almost every bank account and every credit card I have, my credit report, every FedEx I had sent or received, my phone records, my gas records and lots of other information. Shock and awe…and this only took an hour. He could have easily stolen my identity.

Please be careful. Realize we live in a dangerous place. Yesterday on an airplane I overheard a teenager giving her social security number to a friend. She thought nothing about the 20 people who were listening to her conversation.

That’s the bad news; the good news is that you can fight back. Here are some suggestions as to how to go about doing it.

First, assume everything you do is discoverable. Yes, stealth is helpful, but it is not enough.

Tell your banks and brokerage firms not to answer any inquiries about your account without a designated code word or phrase. I learned that the investigator who lambasted me with the personal information blithely broke a few laws to get it and had actually posed as me to get some info. (Note, I didn’t hire him, but he did try to hire me after he was arrested a year later!)

When acquiring real estate and other hard assets, try to acquire title in an anonymously formed business entity. This is not always possible or appropriate (it can make financing difficult for example), but it can add an additional hurdle in some cases. Make sure you involve your lawyer in this process and avoid the many Nevada Corporation bearer share scams.

Finally, hold your "nest egg" assets in solid Asset Protection Plans. For more protection, these protected assets can be put into offshore jurisdictions that take privacy seriously. Yes, we all are aware that the U.S. Government knows all about these accounts, however, private people have a much harder time getting to them.

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