How to Lock Down Your Verizon Wireless Account

Identity Theft is big business for the unforsaken. The Equifax hack is a jinx that will never be forgiven, or soon forgotten, for most Americans. Our Social Security numbers have become our public identifiers for accessing private information and our mobile phone numbers, and SMS text messages, have become our rooted record of no return as the bad actors try to become us by stealing, tainting, or compromising, our sacred identifier streams.

We can try our best to harden what belongs to us — or at least make it more difficult for those who actively choose to harm us to create lasting damage. Unfortunately, 15 minutes of lost control of your phone number can be enough to steal many other founts of treasure that should belong only to you. Control the phone number; manipulate the person; win the assets.

In a recent Reddit thread, I shared some of the following information in this article. As I republish, and rethink, my original warnings here with you today, I want to make sure you are aware of the dangers around you beyond someone just stealing your mobile phone number. You don’t have to be famous, or have a lot of money, to be an identity theft target. Some people get a thrill just knowing they’re ruining your day.

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How Technology Creeps into Everyday Existence to Become Ubiquitous

Let’s roll back our minds a decade to a time when people were not constantly on their smartphones.  Facebook isn’t in our everyday lives for another two years and Twitter will hatch a year after that in 2006.

Smartphones aren’t even called smartphones — they’re just dumb “cellular phones” that do rudimentary text messages without multimedia attachments like images and video.

That barren time in technology was still a difficult one of wide, generational, gaps when it came to the rapid, everyday, adoption of technology.

Those of us who grew up on payphones and single-line telephones in the home, were often put off, and perhaps, even offended by the younger among us who insisted that their cellphones were not just extensions of communication, but a very connectoid of being human.

When I was teaching at a major technical university on the East Coast way back when, I implored my students to not just put their phones on vibrate — at that time in the technological evolution, the vibration of the mechanism in the phone was just as loud as a ringtone — but to actually turn off their phones during the few times other students were giving a formal, graded, presentation in class.

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How Find My iPhone Works from Afar

Janna is currently in Iowa visiting her mother.  I miss her heaps, and I am happy to help whenever the call for assistance arrives from the Midwest into my Google Voice Inbox via SMS.  Janna has her iPad with her and her creaky, water-soaked-and-barely-usable, iPhone 3G.  Her 3GS was stolen.  We skipped the iPhone 4 in indignant principle.  We will move up the iPhone 4S or 5 or whatever it will be when it is announced.

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Leave it on the Machine

Growing up, the phrase “Leave it on the machine” meant one thing and one thing only:  Call me on a hardline telephone and leave a specific voice message on the answering machine connected to the hardline telephone in my house.  I’m not sure when that turn of phrase fell out of favor — does anyone say, “Leave it on voice mail” today?

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Google SMS Answers on Your iPhone

If you aren’t texting the questions in your life to “GOOGLE” (466-453) on your iPhone, or other smart phone, then you aren’t really living an untethered life.  GOOGLE SMS is a free service — though other carrier charges may apply to your SMS phone plan — that instantly answers your questions and helps you win arguments and wager bar bets.  As you can see in the shot below, I was able to get an instant response from Google when I asked for “Weather Los Angeles.”  I was not successful in getting Google to tell me Julie Chen’s age or what year Hawaii gained statehood.

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