Finding out your identity has been stolen is tough. You’ll face anger and shame that the crime even happened to you. But worse than that will be the frustrations you encounter as you’re trying to clean up the mess.
Since identity theft tends to start as a financial crime in most cases, the most important part of clearing up the damage is fixing credit report errors or unauthorized charges and accounts opened in your name. The key to cleaning up your credit report is to move quickly and be patient. The faster you catch and dispute errors, the easier it will be to clean them up. Just understand that even when errors are caught early, disputing a credit report entry will take time.
If you’ve noticed errors in your credit report, the best thing to do is make a complete list of the errors. Look at your personal information as well as your credit information. It’s
Most people have heard about phishing – the practice of using fraudulent emails to gain access to personal information for the purpose of identity theft. But like any activity, an occasional update in the process is needed. Spear phishing is the new black in identity theft.
The term phishing was coined because of the way that criminals try to gain access to personal information – basically, they cast out a bunch of bait in the form of fraudulent emails, and wait to see who bites. Spear phishing, however, is more targeted.
Just a fisherman would use a spear to target a single fish, spear phishing targets individuals. Whereas criminals might send a single, mass e-mail to a couple hundred thousand people in a phishing attack, spear phishing attacks are customized and sent to a single person at a time.
The spear phishing email usually contains personal information such as a name or some tidbit about employment. The
It’s impossible to protect yourself completely from identity theft, but you can cut your risks with some simple precautions.
Don’t give out your personal information. If someone calls you asking for your social security number or a credit card number, ask for a number to call them back. That’s assuming they have a valid need for the information. If you’re ordering something by telephone, don’t let the other person repeat your credit card number – say it twice instead. You don’t know who’s standing behind them taking notes.
Ask questions. If someone asks for sensitive information, ask them why they need it. Find out how will it be used, and what happens to it when they don’t need it anymore. All businesses are supposed to have an information privacy policy they can give out. Ask for a copy.
If you watch the news at all, you know that the risks of identity theft are everywhere. Regular reports of identities being stolen en masse are not uncommon. And that’s to say nothing of the number of times each day that individual identities are stolen.
On any given day you can hear stories about government agencies that lose a laptop which contains hundreds of thousands of personal records or a corporate data breach where criminals hack into a database and steal all of the personal records stored there. Colleges fall victim. Even the medical facilities that so many of us trust without a second thought are at risk.
The number of identity scams that users face is astounding. And the most frightening part is that many of those scams and thefts aren’t even reported until months after they happen. By then, victims are already suffering the losses that come with identity theft.
Identity theft has become a common crime, although statistics show occurrences are decreasing from a high of 10.1 million victims in the year 2003 to 8.4 million in 2007, it still costs consumers and affected organizations nearly $50 billion per year (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2007). And it’s not merely an inconvenience or a detriment to a victim’s credit rating, identity theft is classified as a federal crime.
According to the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998, it is a federal crime if someone “knowingly transfers or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of the Federal law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable State or local law.”
According to the Federal Trade Commission, the most common forms of identity theft include credit card fraud, bank fraud, communications services fraud (such as opening a cell phone account), and obtaining fraudulent loans used to purchase goods or services. No
When we consider how identity theft happens, the various scams and other common methods of identity theft tend to fall into one of two categories. Low-tech methods such as dumpster diving and telephone scams are easier to fight against because they take advantage of a victim’s personal habits. However when considering high-tech methods of identity theft, there’s not much that you can do, because your personal information is stolen from somebody that you gave it to for a business purpose (like buying a house or getting an insurance quote.)
Stolen Wallet/Purse or other personal theft. The earliest cases of identity theft were probably related to personal information obtained by a pickpocket or burglar. The classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, is resolved through an assumed identity, and the concept probably goes further back than that.