According to a PRPresswire annoucement today, The U.S. General Services Administration awarded Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) to assist Federal agencies in protecting the confidentiality of personal credit and payment information, as well as providing a fast and effective solution for Federal agencies needing commercial-off-the-shelf credit monitoring services.

The BPAs were awarded to Equifax, Inc. based in Atlanta, Ga., Experian Consumer Direct of Irvine, Calif., and Bearak Reports, a small, woman-owned firm in Framingham, Mass. Bearak Reports consumer brand is IdentityForce.
Following this decision, Federal agencies to take advantage of reduced unit pricing and volume discounting on credit monitoring services and will be select different levels of credit monitoring services depending on the degree of vulnerability, risk, and protection.

MSN Money has a great interactive map showing ID theft broken down by state which graphically demonstrates the dangers of living in the Southwest of West coast. Here’s some of the same data in a table:

Source: Consumer Sentinel

Caroline Mayer joins on the shredder bandwagon today with an article about college students and shredders in her blog at WashingtonPost.com, writing about a recent pro-shredder press release from Fellows:

My first reaction was to laugh; “what a great marketing pitch,” I thought. But as I read on, I realized that Fellowes raised some good points about college students and identity theft. For example, it noted that as a whole, Americans tend to overestimate the risk of identity theft to the elderly but underestimate it to the young. In fact, statistics on a number of recent surveys show that it’s the younger generation that’s most vulnerable.