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More than 800,000 people fall victim to cyber-attacks each year. These victims range from multi-national organisations to individuals who had their information stolen and had fraudulent activities committed in their name.

Finding out you have been scammed or hacked is gut-wrenching, and it can be challenging to know what to do to get your life back on track and recover from the damage caused.

If you find yourself the victim of a scam or hack and have had your life and personal information compromised, these tips can help you move forward.

Inform Everyone

These are places like your bank, your driving licence, work-related agencies, contacts, lenders and so on. Inform them that a third party has accessed your details and contact their fraud department. From here, you need to ask for any transactions or requests made on your behalf since the event occurred and ask them to stop reporting anything to credit bureaus to reduce the damage caused.

From here, you can get your accounts frozen or closed and start the process of making things right and securing everything once more.

Set Up Fraud alerts

You need to set up fraud alerts with the major credit referencing agencies to help you alert them of fraudulent activity going on and to ensure it does not impact your credit score, your ability to get credit in the future, as well as your reputation with existing creditors.

If you contact one of the major agencies, they are required to contact two other companies to pass the details on, so this can make things easier for you. You don’t have to do it three times over.

Talk To Local Law Enforcement

Scams and hacks can come in many forms, and if you feel your local law enforcement agency needs to be aware of their use, you can report it to them. For example, if you have had your wallet stolen in a popular area, report this to the police so they are aware of the criminal activity; the same goes for criminals using skimming machines on cash points, too.

Secure Your Online Activities

Following on from the above point, you can look at how you might have been hacked online or how your details were accessed due to your activities. Are you using unsecured websites to make purchases or clicking links you shouldn’t be? Or did you neglect to choose secure passwords, and your data was breached this way?

Identify your habits online and look at ways you can increase sentry. From setting up MFA, changing your passwords and finding out how to change ip on mac so your location and ip address aren’t visible to people can be great places to start.

Ignore Calls and Emails

If you are scammed via a phone call telling you that your bank account or Amazon account, for example, has been hacked, there is a big chance your details will be passed to different scammers for them to try their luck, too. The same goes for emails.

You need to ignore calls from numbers you don’t recognise or resemble the initial scam if you do answer. Simply hang up and do not engage at all (it’s important here to remember to delete any software they had you install if this is applicable, too). Don’t open or click links in suspicious emails; always trust your gut.