Here’s how to keep scammers away from your phone number

Protecting your personal information has never been more crucial, and your phone number is particularly vulnerable to scammers, especially online. Here’s how to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

Safeguard your phone number online

You can immediately take these three steps to keep your phone number safe:

• Remove unnecessary apps. Some apps request access to your phone number, potentially making it vulnerable to data breaches. Remove apps you no longer use or those with questionable security practices.
• Check your social media profiles. Make sure that your social media profiles don’t publicly display your phone number, and adjust privacy settings to restrict who can see your contact information.
• Remove your personal phone number from company sites. Review websites – such as those where you might purchase goods or services – where you may have shared your phone number. Remove your phone number from company sites, or update your preferences to limit its visibility.

You can also subscribe to an online data removal service, like Incogni, which helps users remove sensitive information from all broker types, even those tricky People Search Sites where scammers help themselves to unprotected phone numbers.

Identity theft can wreak havoc on your life, leading to financial losses and emotional distress. You can help protect yourself from this threat and also curb other nuisances like spam calls.

Health insurers raising rates based on your online profile? Incogni’s got you covered.

Fraud calls from people impersonating entities like the IRS or Amazon, or prepaid card scams? Incogni helps you stay a step ahead of these thieves.

How Incogni works

Incogni, which was created by cybersecurity company Surfshark, jumps through data companies’ hoops, adhering to each one’s particular removal procedure so that you don’t have to.

Incogni‘s automated personal information removal service will ferret out your personal data that brokers most want to sell. It will then send out wave after wave of opt-out requests on your behalf.

It will deal with extra data broker interactions like rejection appeals, taking it off your to-do list of annoying chores. And Incogni is relentless – it restarts the whole process every three months to keep your data out of circulation.

And in a special offer just for 9to5Mac readers, Incogni is exclusively offering 55% off its full annual price plans if you use the code “9to5mac.”

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