If you are getting solicitations as often as Clark, many of them are probably credit monitoring services. Companies are jumping on the identity theft scare and are convincing people that they need their credit monitored 24 hours a day. You should really only consider one of these services if you’ve already been a victim of ID theft. After all, we can get our credit reports for free these days, so you can “monitor” it yourself. Just remember to mark your calendar to order a report from each of the services every four months. Also, be aware of the sites out there that offer free credit reports. Many of them really just want you to sign up for their costly services in the process. There is only one site that offers free credit reports with no strings attached - annualcreditreport.com. In addition, you may have heard about the security breach at Choicepoint. The company sold information to criminals, who then took over the customers’ identity. Well, Clark recently read a report stating that Choicepoint is now trying to charge customers $25 to see what the criminals saw. He wants to talk to the company about this to see if it’s really true.