While most Americans are arguing about when it’s appropriate to start putting up Christmas lights, criminals are already busy gearing up for the holiday season because that’s when they have the most opportunities to steal your identity.

In 2023, U.S. holiday retail sales reached just over 950 billion dollars, with 8.8% of that coming from online sales. This is a prime source of the information that identity thrives need to run up debt under the names of unsuspecting consumers.

Once they get a hold of it, they tend to take advantage immediately, while most Americans are distracted by the holidays. It’s easy for smaller charges to get overlooked among all of the other charges, and it’s often weeks or months before the true extent of the damage is known to the victim.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. There are steps you can take to protect your credit, both during the holiday season and beyond.

The first thing you need to do is pull a full, three bureau credit report to make sure that you’re not already a victim of identity theft. Spend the time necessary to go through your report with a fine-toothed comb, looking for anything that doesn’t belong.

This includes incorrect balances, unrecognized late payments, new accounts, and even unfamiliar addresses. Immediately research and take action on anything you see here. You’ll dispute these inaccuracies with each bureau, and depending on the circumstances, you may also need to file a report with your local police department.

Next, while waiting for the bureaus to research and update any erroneous information, you’ll put a lock on your credit profile to prevent identity thieves from creating new accounts in your name. Think of this like the door on a bank vault—sure, someone could get access to your personal information and use it to apply for credit, but because your profile is locked, any creditor will be stopped dead in their tracks no matter how convincing the identity thief may be. And short of infiltrating each of the three credit bureaus, there’s literally nothing anyone can do to circumvent that.

The only time you should unlock your credit report from then on is when you are actively applying for credit, and then you should relock it immediately afterwards. This is something I preach about on my nationally syndicated, weekly TV segment on DailyFlash.

From here, we enter more of a maintenance phase that will be ongoing for the rest of your life. (Unless you decide to become a nomadic monk wandering the wilderness for the rest of your life, in which case, credit will be pointless. But I suspect that’s not your plan.)

At a minimum, you’ll want to pull a three bureau credit report every quarter to stay on top of things, and make sure you have alerts turned on—especially for dark web monitoring. You’re looking for the same red flags here that I mentioned earlier, and the solution is the same as well. This will also give you the information you need to work on improving your credit score, which will save you thousands of dollars over your life.

But don't stop here—this is just scratching the surface. By the time something hits your credit report, the damage has already been done and could take weeks or even months to fix. So instead of relying entirely on your credit report, you also need to keep a closer eye on your account activity.

While someone may not be able to open new credit in your name, they could still make unauthorized charges on your existing accounts, and keep in mind that small charges are pretty easy to miss among the dozens of subscription charges most of us have today. But you’ll want to look beyond the charges and also look out for any changes to your account details, like addresses, phone numbers, and authorized users because these changes can be used to take over your account, at least temporarily, and rack up thousands of dollars in debt under your name. It’s also important to change your passwords regularly, and wherever possible, implement Two-Factor Authentication, or 2FA.

The holidays are a prime time for identity thieves, but the truth is your credit is at risk all year long, so your efforts to protect it need to match that.

Take the steps necessary this year, and you’ll save yourself thousands of dollars, hours of your time, and frustration by avoiding the mess that comes with identity theft, instead of trying to clean it up after the fact. Having seen hundreds of cases, I can say with absolute certainty that it’s well worth the effort.

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Amanda Webster is the COO of Fund&Grow, which helps entrepreneurs get the business credit they need to run and scale their companies. She is recognized as one of the leading experts in the industry, and is regularly asked to speak on the topic on stage and in the media.