*Prizes and Sweepstakes:
Have you recently “won” a foreign lottery or a contest you didn’t enter? Trash the notification of the news: It’s nothing more than a bid to make you respond. In a minimal-damage scenario, your response to such a come-on will land you on a widely circulated “sucker” list. At worst, it can set you up for a scam. Neither Publishers Clearinghouse nor Readers Digest Sweepstakes rents out its list; both, however, offer to remove your name from their files upon request. To do so, contact:

Publishers Clearinghouse

• Call: 800-645-9242
• Write:Consumer & Privacy Affairs Publishers Clearinghouse 382 Channel Drive Port Washington, New York 11050
• E-mail:

Readers Digest Sweepstakes

• Call: 800-310-6261 (800-735-4327 for hearing impaired)
• Write: Reader's Digest P.O. Box 50005 Prescott, Arizona  86301-5005

*Charities: If you have donated to one, you’ll likely get mail from others. Not only do nonprofits often share their lists, but there’s no central opt-out for charity solicitations. One way to reduce this kind of mail: Ask any organization that you support not to sell or rent your name and address. Look for opt-out boxes on donation forms.

*Sexually Oriented Material: To stop sexually explicit material, ask for Form 1500 at your post office or print out and fill in the following form: www.usps.com/forms/_pdf/ps1500.pdf
There are companies that will do opt-out services for a fee. They include: 41pounds.org: http://www.41pounds.org/ and Private Citizen: www.private-citizen.com./

What else can you do?

• Waive that warranty card. When you buy a new toaster, it’s easy to get burned long before the bread pops up. The source of the tsuris is the warranty card included in the packaging. “Warranty cards are primarily used by the product’s manufacturer to profile you,” explains California identity-theft attorney Mari Frank. “They will then sell that information to others, who in turn send you mailings for their own products and services. That’s why warranty cards so often ask you for your household income, how many kids you have, what your hobbies and interests are. But you should know that unscrupulous employees can easily get their hands on your warranty-card info, then use it to steal your identity.”
  
• Your protection: Provided you keep the receipt, a product remains under warranty for the designated period whether you return the warranty card or not. If you unwisely choose to “register” your purchase with the manufacturer, submit the warranty card bearing nothing more than your name, address, and date of purchase. (If required, enclose a copy of your receipt.) In the same mailing, specify that your personal information is not to be distributed to others. There’s no need to answer any other questions.
  
• Don’t snub those stuffers. The opt-out contacts above primarily deal with unsolicited mail and telephone calls from companies you have nothing to do with. But what about stopping the spread of your personal information from companies with which you already do business?
  
• Your protection: Once a year, financial institutions are required to inform their customers how they use their personal information, and what opt-out rights those customers have. “The trick is that these notices often come in envelopes stuffed with other correspondence,” notes privacy expert Eric Gertler. “Because of this, many people unknowingly discard them.”

These notices sometimes provide a mailing address (or, more rarely, a phone number or a website address) that permits customers to stop their financial institutions from sharing their personal information with unaffiliated third parties. This is that rare offer you truly should not refuse: Taking them up on it may halt unwanted that originates from totally unsuspected sources. Even if you don’t take this step, you can always stop the spread of your personal information the good old-fashioned way: Contact your bank, credit-card issuer, or insurer and inform them you are opting out of sharing. Opting out stops a company from supplying your personal information to third-party firms, but that company can go right on furnishing the data to its subsidiaries or affiliates. Gertler, the former CEO of Privista—an identity-theft protection and credit-management company—cites the hypothetical example of a customer who banks with Citibank: “Even if you opt out, your information may be passed to any of Citibank’s affiliate companies, such as its credit-card division or its mortgage component.”


What doesn’t work
The U.S. Postal Service delivers—but don’t expect it to deliver you from the mountains of unsolicited mail it dumps on your doorstep. Direct-marketing mailings, which have increased by some five billion pieces since the National Do Not Call Registry went into effect in October 2003, generate billions of dollars in revenue for the USPS.

Maybe that’s why some seemingly obvious steps for refusing these mailings don’t really work. For instance: 

• Writing “Return to Sender” or “Refused” on the envelopes of unsolicited letters and placing them in your outgoing mail will not remove you from the sender’s distribution list. The USPS does not forward third-class bulk mail; postal regulations require that it be discarded.
• Placing unsolicited mail in a return envelope with postage due is another futile attempt to stop future mailings. In all likelihood, the United States Postal Service will simply return the envelope to you for the correct postage. If you omit your return address and the Post Office is unable to return it to the sender, the envelope will go to the USPS’s mail-recovery center.

Adapted from "Scam-Proof Your Life" by Sid Kirchheimer. Copyright © 2006 Sid Kirchheimer. Adapted by permission of AARP Books/Sterling. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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