After an identity theft, it can take several weeks or months to restore your identity. Some complex cases may take a year or longer, while cases where you catch the potential identity theft early may only take a few weeks to straighten out.
If you have an identity theft restoration specialist helping you, the process should happen quicker. These specialists can do some of the tasks for you and can point you in the right direction for performing other tasks. If you don’t subscribe to an identity theft protection service, you can hire a lawyer to represent you in the process of restoring your identity, and the lawyer can perform some of the same tasks as the specialist.
It is possible to try to do all the steps yourself, but it can be very time consuming. You will need to make a lot of phone calls and to file quite a few documents. Many of these phone calls must happen during normal business hours, which could interfere with your ability to work at your place of employment. Understand that you likely will have to hire a lawyer at some point to help with legal documents anyway, so there will be some cost associated with restoring your identity, even when trying to do the work yourself.