2.3 Million Identities stolen from Certegy Check Service

A seven year employee of Fidelity's Certegy Check Services Inc. unit has been charged by the US Secret Service with compromising the identities of over 2.3 million people. Although large, this breach does not even come close to matching the size of the TJ Maxx fiasco.

This breach occurred at Fidelity National who provides payment processing services for the retail, mortgage, and other like businesses.

According to an article on CNN Money, the former employee stole bank and credit card records and sold them to a data broker.

What You Should Do If You Think Your Identity Has Been Stolen

1. Put a freeze on your credit files
2. If you use a debit card, carefully monitor your checking and savings accounts for unauthorized activity.
3. Consider closing your checking and savings accounts and transferring them to another account number.
4. Periodically check your credit report at http://www.annualcreditreport.com/
5. Visit the Federal Trade Commissions Identity Theft Site
6. Regularly monitor all of your financial accounts

The 107th Carnival of Personal Finance

Want to learn a whole lot about personal finance? Then you need to read these posts in The 107th Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted by Blogging Away Debt.

Some notable posts...

Family is Key to Personal Finance Success

Are you addicted to borrowing money?

The way banks look at you Part 3

And my personal favorite... The B Word

Thanks to Tricia at Blogging Away Debt for hosting this carnival!

This Weeks Top 5 on Money and Credit

This week I've been looking into a number of online savings and banking programs, and general information about saving money. A lot of my research included reading recent blog posts about online bank accounts and saving money in general. So, this week I give you the 5 posts that I enjoyed the most about Savings.

Read about "How to Start a Roth IRA (And where to do it )" at Get Rich Slowly. Easy to understand answers for many questions.

Here is a good post at Free Money Finance about 'Saving Money By Taking Your Lunch To Work' . Makes a good point about saving time, money and eating healthy!

Trent at The Simple Dollar has a great plan to save money. Read this post titled Treat it as a bill; How I made a commitment to savings work for me .

Here are 5 Ways To Save Money Without Noticing from Blueprint For Financial Prosperity. Some good ideas about taking a look at what your spending and deciding whether or not its really worth it.

Over at Money Matters and More Musings, golbguru shares 25 Things We Do To Save Money. I especially like the 4 year old jeans and not carrying credit card balances.