For the most part, when a company's database was breached, a laptop with personal information was lost or credit card numbers got swiped, it was up to consumers to put fraud alerts on their credit reports, check those reports frequently and put back the pieces of their credit history together on their own.

Starting Sunday, businesses that extend credit will have to take extra steps to protect your personal information on the front end, and investigate if they find something of concern.

That's when Federal Trade Commission rules will kick in. The so-called ``Red Flags Rule'' require businesses, small and large, to do a better job of verifying the identity of their customers -- to keep them from being taken advantage of by identity thieves.

From now on businesses -- from utilities to physicians -- will be on the lookout for fraud alerts on consumers' credit reports, identification that doesn't look like the person presenting it and anything that looks forged.

EXTRA STEPS

These and 23 other potential red flags are supposed to lead businesses to take extra steps to figure out who they are doing business with.

``What it focuses on is any company that extends credit -- such as where they bill you now and you pay in 30 days,'' said Miami attorney Luis Salazar, of Greenberg Traurig. ``If there's a red flag, they have to investigate.''

Businesses that accept credit cards aren't necessarily subject to the rules, which were enacted in 2007.

The deadline to put the rules into effect was extended to give businesses time to come up with written plans to address identity theft.

NO. 1 COMPLAINT

Identity theft has been consumers' No. 1 complaint to the FTC for nine years, with nearly 314,000 complaints in 2008. Florida registered about 133 complaints for every 100,000 residents -- among the highest rates in the country. ``Nobody wants to be overburdened with regulations,'' Salazar said, ``but they want to do something about'' identity theft.

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