A few days before you leave for vacation, review these guidelines to ensure that your home will be safe while you’re away.
Secure your home against intruders
• Lock every door and window including garage doors and windows on upper floors. Test each lock to make sure it’s working properly.
• Remove any spare house keys you may have hidden around your property, including ones in your car or garage, under a doormat, inside a fake rock, under a potted plant, etc. Thieves know all the popular hiding places, so don’t take any chances.
• Look in your windows from outside to see if any burglar-enticing valuables are out in plain sight.
• Since burglars typically expect to find valuables in the bedroom or the living room, hide precious items like jewelry and electronics in the kitchen.
Protect against the weather
Unplug all non-essential electronics and secure yard furniture or anything else (kids toys, yard decorations, BBQ grill, etc.) that could get blown around during a storm.
• If your basement or patio is prone to flooding, make sure the drain is unobstructed.
• During colder months, protect your pipes from freezing by leaving the heat on low.
• Clear debris from the gutters and downspouts.
• Make sure the weather stripping on all exterior doors (including the garage door) is intact and seals tightly when closed.
Make it look like you’re around
• Ask a trusted neighbor to pick up your mail or collect your newspapers.
• Have a neighbor take out your trash cans and recycling for you.
• Install timers for your interior lights (and possibly a radio) to give the impression that someone is home in the evenings.
• If you’ll be gone more than a week, make sure someone maintains your lawn. During winter months, ask someone to shovel your sidewalk/driveway if it snows.
• Leave a car in your driveway if you can, or better yet, ask a neighbor to park in your driveway while you’re gone.
Maintain your privacy
If no one’s staying in your house, don’t post anything on social media before or during your vacation. If you must share photos while on vacation, make sure the social media profile(s) you’re posting to cannot be viewed publicly.
• Check in on your social media profiles periodically while you’re away to make sure none of your friends or family have inadvertently made your absence public. For example: “Hope you’re having a great vacation in Mexico! See you when you’re back next week.”
• If your car is in long-term parking at the airport, don’t leave anything inside that could direct thieves to your home (e.g. portable GPS device, papers with your address on them, etc.)
• If your garage will be empty, cover or frost the garage windows so it’s not obvious that your car is gone.
Have someone watch over your house
• Ask a trusted neighbor or friend to stop by your house periodically to make sure everything is fine.
• If you have a neighborhood watch, let them know the dates of your trip and when to expect you back.
• Get a home security system that can be accessed remotely so you can periodically check in on your home while you’re away. Better yet, it should notify you as soon as something happens in your home that’s out of the ordinary so you can take action from wherever you are.
• It’s simple to protect your home when you’re on vacation. Plan ahead, think through all the angles, and you’ll be covered.
Holiday Shopping Tips
The Maple Valley Police reminds holiday shoppers to beware of cyber criminals who are out to steal money and personal information. Scammers use many techniques to defraud consumers, from phishing e-mails offering too good to be true deals on brand-name merchandise to offering quick cash to victims who will re-ship packages to additional destinations.
While monitoring credit reports and reviewing account statements each month is always a good idea, consumers should keep a particularly watchful eye on their personal credit information at this time of year. Scrutinizing credit card bills for any fraudulent activity can help to minimize victims’ losses. Unrecognizable charges listed on a credit card statement are often the first time consumers realize their personally identifiable information has been stolen.
Bank transactions and correspondence from financial institutions should also be closely reviewed. Bank accounts can often serve as a target for criminals to initiate account takeovers or commit identity theft by creating new accounts in the victims’ name. Consumers should never click on a link embedded in an e-mail from their bank, but rather open a new webpage and manually enter the URL (web address), because phishing scams often start with phony e-mails that feature the bank’s name and logo.
When shopping online, make sure to use reputable sites. Often consumers are shown specials on the web, or even in e-mail offers, that look too good to be true. These sites are used to capture personally identifiable information, including credit card numbers, addresses and phone numbers to make fraudulent transactions. It’s best to shop on sites with which you are familiar and that have an established reputation as trusted online retailers.
If you look for an item or company name through a search engine site, scrutinize the results listed before going to a website. Do not automatically click on the first result, even if it looks identical or similar to the desired result. Many fraudsters go to extreme lengths to have their own website appear ahead of a legitimate company on popular search engines. Their website may be a mirrored version of a popular website, but with a slightly different URL.Purchases made on these sites could result in one or more of the following consequences: never receiving the item, having your credit card details stolen, or downloading malware/computer virus to your computer. Before clicking on a result in a search engine, inspect the URL of the destination website. Look for any misspellings or extra characters such as a period or comma as these are indicative of fraud. When taken to the payment page of a website, again verify the URL and ensure it is secure by starting with “HTTPS,” not just “HTTP.”
