JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) - Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster is offering tips on how to avoid falling victim to identity theft.
A new section on Koster's website includes such advice as shredding financial documents and storing Social Security cards in a safe place - not in a wallet or purse. Koster also suggests that people change their passwords for various accounts every 60 days and choose hard-to-crack combinations that use a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols.
Koster says identity thieves can gather people's information by digging through trash, stealing mail, filling out change-of-address forms and a number of other sneaky ways.
The new website can be found at http://ago.mo.gov/publications/idtheft.htm .