What to do if your identity is stolen

Cifas protective registration places a marker on your credit file that tells lenders and other Cifas members to carry out extra verification before granting credit, opening an account or issuing a product in your name. It carries a small fee and lasts two years.

It is not a credit freeze in the American sense — it does not block applications outright — but it forces manual checks and is the closest equivalent available in the UK. It will also slow down your own genuine applications, which is the trade-off.

Cifas also operates the National Fraud Database, so registering feeds the intelligence picture as well as protecting you.

If a specific account or card is compromised, call your bank on 159 immediately. It connects you securely to your own bank's fraud team and cannot be spoofed, so it is also the number to use if someone claiming to be your bank has called you.

Britain has three credit reference agencies — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — and lenders use different ones. An account opened fraudulently may appear on one and not another, so checking a single agency gives incomplete information.

You are entitled to free access to your credit information from all three. Statutory reports are available on request, and free ongoing access is offered by each agency directly and through several free services.

Look for: credit searches you did not authorise, accounts you did not open, addresses you have never lived at, and financial associations with people you do not know. Any of these is a signal.

Dispute anything wrong directly with the credit reference agency, which must investigate with the lender and correct or remove inaccurate information. You can also add a notice of correction to your file explaining the circumstances, which lenders see when assessing you.

Under UK GDPR you have a right to rectification of inaccurate personal data, and the credit reference agencies are subject to it.

Report to Action Fraud, the national reporting centre for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or to Police Scotland on 101 in Scotland. The crime reference number is what banks, lenders and insurers frequently require before acting.

Passport: report a lost or stolen passport to HM Passport Office, which cancels it. A cancelled passport is worthless to a fraudster, and reporting also protects you from being associated with its misuse.

Driving licence: report it to DVLA and apply for a replacement. Unlike some countries the number is derived from your name and date of birth, so it cannot simply be reissued differently — which makes the report itself more important.

National Insurance number: this cannot be changed except in exceptional circumstances. Contact HMRC, which can place additional security on your record and monitor for misuse.

Government accounts: change credentials for GOV.UK One Login, HMRC and your UKVI account, and review each for changes you did not make — particularly bank details for refunds and payments.

If an organisation lost your data, they must tell you where there is a high risk to you, and you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office about how they handled it.

Change your email password first and enable two-factor authentication on it. Email is the recovery route for every other account, so it is the one an attacker most wants and the one to secure first.

Prefer an authenticator app to text message codes. SIM-swap fraud, where an attacker ports your number to their own SIM, defeats SMS-based security across every service simultaneously. Ask your mobile provider to add a port-out restriction or account PIN.

Check bank and card statements line by line for several months, including very small transactions — fraudsters commonly test a card with a trivial payment before a large one.

Watch for post that stops arriving. A redirected mail instruction is a classic identity fraud technique; Royal Mail has a process for reporting a redirection you did not request.

If a debt has been created in your name, dispute it in writing with the creditor and the credit reference agency, attaching your Action Fraud reference. If the creditor is a regulated financial firm and refuses, the Financial Ombudsman Service will determine it free of charge.

The psychological impact is real, and Victim Support offers free confidential help on 08 08 16 89 111 whether or not you reported the crime.