Last month, a friend of mine, we’ll call him David, got an alert from his identity protection service.
It wasn’t a $2,000 charge for a new TV. It wasn’t $10,000 worth of phones in another country. It was a $48.50 bill opened in his full legal name for a utility company in a city he’d never even visited.
He texted me: “This is weird. It’s not a lot of money. Is this a big deal? My credit card company will reverse it.”
I wrote back immediately: “Yes. That’s the most important alert you could get.”
🚪The quiet knock before the break-in
We’ve all been trained to watch for stuff like flashy credit card fraud, huge purchases, big loans and hacked bank accounts. Banks and credit card companies are great at spotting and reversing those.
But a small utility bill? That’s an identity problem. That $48 charge wasn’t the major crime, it was the test.
A sophisticated thief had David’s Social Security number and used a “soft” inquiry, an ordinary bill, to see if the identity was live before moving on to the main event.
☠️ Death by a thousand cuts
If that $48 charge had gone through unchallenged for a week, the next steps were already queued up: apply for a $70,000 car loan, open three high-limit credit cards and lease a luxury apartment or get a home loan.
This is the new, fresh angle on identity theft. The real danger isn’t the one big, obvious fraud. It’s small, mundane transactions thieves use to test your identity’s foundation.
⛑️ You need to protect your identity
David was able to shut the entire operation down before it started. He didn’t have to clean up a mess. He prevented it. And in 2025, that’s the whole point. I used to have LifeLock, but the cost was approaching $300 a year. That’s when I found NordProtect.
Making sure your credit and good name aren’t exploited is exactly what NordProtect (a sponsor of my radio show) is built for. The smartest identity thieves are subtle. You need protection that’s smarter. Their Black Friday deal is active now. You get 71% off, or full protection for only $4.27 per month.
Go to NordProtect.com/Kim to get started today because catching the small stuff early is how you stop the big stuff cold.