Amazon is down. Don't know what it means, but...
just thought I'd mention it as a point of interest. Never seen that happen before. Wonder what that's costing them!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Geez. 
credit companies (Trans Union, Equifax and Experian are the most well known and largest companies). You also could call your bank to alert them of possible misuse of your credit/debit cards or of someone trying to access your accounts electronically from their websites. I'm going to contact all of the above because they didn't take get any CC info from work, they got an obscure file that had ssn's. Much more of a pain because you can always get another CC or bank account, but your stuck with your ssn. We're going to watching these things now until we croak -- no more even temporary feeling of security. 
The fraud alert worked really well. We originally did it because someone stole my CC info (we think it was from a restaurant we went to) and bought accounts on AOL. AOL wouldn't tell us anything about the accounts, even though it was definitely my card number/name in setting it up. We had to file a police report to get the info from AOL. We called Experian and it showed on the report whenever someone tried for a loan or to open another credit card under our names. We contacted the banks because they then look more closely at your actual card transactions/patterns.
We were at a Bassett store filling out an order for a new couch and Experian called hubby on his cell phone before we even signed the paperwork to say someone was putting in a payment plan request from Bassett for X dollars. We said that it was fine because we were right there at the desk filling out the paperwork. Same thing happened when we applied for a car loan. I still regularly get calls from my credit card or debit card if they see something they think is strange (like when I purchased 400 yoyo's for a function and put it on my card instead of using a company card).
Even without activating a fraud alert, you are entitled to one free credit report a year from one of the main companies to monitor your credit status. However, if you really want to know what your credit score (FICO score) is, that freebie report won't tell you. You have to pay for that, or look at the report that comes back if you've applied for a recent loan.
The box was big enough to bury me in 
For now...
It's back on, BTW, and I just ordered another "boatload" of stuff.
RIP little guy
