Avoiding Identity Theft via Gift-Cards

As a follow up to my prior article on identity theft avoidance, I've found that there may be some steps that you can take now to help.

Stored Value Cards (Gift Cards

General stored value cards (like visa or mastercard ones) are a great way to protect your privacy while maintaining the flexiblity of a credit card. With one of these you can pay most, if not all bills without having to disclose your personal information. You can pay cash and then use it anywhere Visa is accepted. It's great. Also, if stolen, no-one can take any more of your money than what is on the card.

This doesn't address the problem of service insecurity (here and here) but it's a start. It can help alleviate credit card fraud, credit bureau mistakes (identity theft leading to a bad credit rating which is HARD to reverse) and so forth.

Prepaid Cellular Service

You can avoid celluar service provider insecurity, like that which I suffered, by using a pre-paid cellular plan. By far the biggest problem with this is that it is still far more expensive than competing service plans. However, the price gap is narrowing and I wouldn't be surprised to see it become competitive eventually. It may never match, but it could get close enough.

Others?

If you know of any others please tell me. Also, if you know of any common stores where you can buy Visa Gift Cards tell me, too. So far I don't know which local stores I can buy them at with cash. You can buy them online... but then THAT store has your credit card information, thus leading to the risk of their being hacked and getting your credit-card info... The ideal would be using cash to buy a gift-card, so you didn't have to open a security hole in the process.