15 Worst Things to Carry in Your Wallet

With identity theft rampant, keep only the essentials in your pocket or purse

Katherine Skiba and Christina Ianzito,

AARP

Comments

Published December 17, 2024

Your wallet can be leaner — many of the informational items we once carried can be accessed on our smartphones.

Tom Schierlitz/Trunk Archive

In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry’s neurotic friend George Costanza has so much stuff jam-packed into his wallet that it’s ridiculed as a “filing cabinet.” Walking down the street, Costanza the pack rat tries to stuff one more thing inside, and the billfold explodes, scattering its contents to the wind.

Jon Clay, vice president of threat intelligence for Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity firm, mentions the episode when talking about what consumers should not carry in their wallets lest they lose valuable information. The lessons of the old sitcom remain timely in an era in which identity theft is epidemic: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received more than one million reports of identity theft last year. Within that category, the top type was credit card, with more than 416,000 reports. (The number is probably far higher; fraud is notoriously underreported.)

Thieves could take more than the cash in your wallet; they could profit from your stolen information, Clay says. A man in suburban Chicago left his wallet at a grocery store’s self-checkout. Even though the victim canceled his bank cards, the thief took his driver’s license and used it to withdraw $15,000 from his bank account.

“We all think we are being careful, but it takes one second for a criminal to steal our wallet or purse,” says Amy Nofziger, director of victim support for the AARP Fraud Watch Network.

How to keep your wallet safe

Your wallet can be leaner — and to cybercriminals, meaner. Many of the informational items we once carried can be accessed on our smartphones, including digital wallets that contain digital versions of your credit cards, prepaid cards and debit cards. Apple, Samsung and Google offer mobile payment services. For your analog wallet, take these steps:

1. Clean and sort. Take everything out of your wallet and sort it all, with an eye to paring it way back. Remove old receipts, shopping lists, business cards, single-store credit cards that rarely get used, coffee shop punch cards that you’ll likely never fill up, and so on. If it’s not something you’ll need often or in an emergency, keep it at home.

2. Store some items. Create a safe and secure storage system at home for the occasional wallet items you’ve removed. You can put extra cash there, too. Grab cards or items when needed, and when done with your errand, return the cards to their secure spot.

3. Make copies. Consumer advocates advise making photocopies (or taking smartphone photos) of the front and back of all your cards, so you know whom to contact if they go missing.

Video: What to Do if Your Wallet Is Lost or Stolen

Things you shouldn’t keep in your wallet

Here are 15 things you should remove from your wallet and store in a safe place, depending on how often you need to access them:

1.  Social Security card. You do not need it for daily use, and criminals could use it to open lines of credit in your name or sell it to another criminal.

Most Popular

2. Multiple credit cards and credit card receipts. Choose one credit card and one debit card you wish to use the most, and leave the others at home. Multiple credit cards are a gold mine for criminals. They can easily charge items online or send runners to different stores.

3.  Checkbook, or even one blank check. The days when you might need one for a purchase are mostly in the past.

4. Work ID card.

5. Passport or passport card.

6. List of your passwords.

7. Gift card not fully redeemed.

8. Birth certificate.

9. Library card. It sounds benign, but a criminal can always check out lots of books and sell them for a buck or two apiece, Clay warns.

10. House key. Thieves could find your address from the contents of a stolen wallet.

11. Legal paperwork. Don’t carry any legal documents in your wallet or purse that you don’t need that day. It sounds obvious, but Nofgizer says, “We’ve had reports on the Helpline where people had their wallets or purses stolen and their divorce documents were included.” That means the thief has your sensitive financial data, children’s birthdates and other personal information.

12. Checks made out to you. You don’t just want to keep your own checks at home. If criminals get their hands on a check you’ve received, they can forge your signature and cash it, Nofziger notes. Consider depositing your check using your bank’s smartphone app.

13. Your PIN. It’s bad enough to lose your credit card: You don’t want to give them the key to your account, says Frank McKenna, chief fraud strategist at the fraud detection company Point Predictive. “You would be surprised at how many times people told me they wrote their PINs on the back of the credit cards so they would not forget them.”

14. Your cryptocurrency seed phrase or recovery phrase. As with passwords or PINs, some people might keep the seed phrase (a sequence of 12 or 24 words that a crypto investor needs to access or recover cryptocurrency on blockchains or crypto wallets) in their actual wallets, notes McKenna. Criminals can use it to wipe out your wealth.

15. Receipts. Don’t carry around those store and restaurant receipts, says Steve Weisman, an attorney and fraud authority who reports on scams for his website, scamicide.com. “Even though your full credit card number won’t be shown on the receipt, an industrious identity thief can use the last five digits to construct legitimate-appearing emails that seem to come from your credit card company or a company that you do business with,” he says. Their goal? To get you to provide them with the full number.

Only carry your Medicare card when you must

To help protect your identity, your Medicare card no longer carries your Social Security number. But your Medicare number — unique to you — should be closely guarded and never shared with anyone who contacts you out of the blue by phone, email or text or in person.

Only carry your Medicare card when you are headed to an appointment that might require it. In the wrong hands, your Medicare number may be used for a variety of scams, including filing for false claims and reimbursement. If someone calls and asks for your information or money or threatens to cancel your benefits, report it immediately to 800-633-4227 (800-MEDICARE) or online.

Show your Medicare card to your doctor, hospital or other health care provider when you get services. If you have a Medicare drug plan or supplemental coverage, carry that plan card with you, too.

If you join a Medicare Advantage plan or another Medicare health plan, you’ll use your plan’s card to get services, not your Medicare card. You'll only need to access your Medicare card if you switch plans or go back to original Medicare.

If the worst happens and your wallet is stolen, AARP suggests following these steps.

Synthetic identities: A growing threat

Less is more when it comes to what’s in your wallet because criminals have begun creating synthetic identities, a fast-growing form of fraud. And it’s made easier these days with the assistance of AI tools.

Here’s how they operate:

Any information that a criminal finds or steals from a wallet can be used to create synthetic identities. The crooks exploit personally identifiable information, such as a Social Security number — often from children or seniors — as well as an address or phone number of one or more people.
They combine this information with fake information to build a new identity, making synthetic identity fraud difficult to detect. Criminals will often “incubate” identity information and upload and sell it on the dark web, hard-to-access portions of the internet where illicit transactions can occur. Then it can be used by another criminal to perpetrate fraud.
Once a synthetic identity is in place, criminals can create accounts in your name.
It could be a year or more before a fraudulent account is created and longer before the criminal “busts out” with stolen funds, catching victims off guard and wondering when and where their information was compromised. The FTC recommends security measures such as two-factor identification to prevent unauthorized access to online accounts. Learn more about password safety here.

%{postComment}%

Katherine Skiba covers scams and fraud for AARP. Previously she was a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She was a recipient of Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship and is the author of the book Sister in the Band of Brothers: Embedded With the 101st Airborne in Iraq.

Christina Ianzito is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who joined AARP in 2010. She’s the travel and books editor for aarp.org and AARP The Magazine, and also edits and writes health, entertainment and other stories for aarp.org. She received a 2020 Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing.