You are in danger of identity theft every day. On any given day, you are exposed to dozens of chances where your personal information is at risk. Identity thieves are after your information, facts that will allow them to pretend to be you long enough to enrich themselves while causing you no end of grief.
Identity theft is big business. Each year, identity theft affects over 15 million victims, with monetary losses going above 50 billion dollars. That is approximately seven percent of the population of the United States, with the average loss being 3,500 dollars. The biggest danger for the victims is that it will ruin their credit scores for life.
Identity thieves are after a specific set of facts. The more of these facts that they can gather about you, the easier it is for them to assume your identity for the brief period of time they need to fill their own wallets and wreck havoc on your future financial health. The more facts that they can get, the easier it becomes for them.
So what information are they after? Ironically, identity thieves openly tell people what they are after. For example, taking an email from my spam folder, I can create a list of information that an identity thief would love to know about you.
The sender of the email pretends to be from PayPal. They tell me that the email address of my PayPal account has been changed. In the interest of security, I am told that PayPal has temporary suspended my account until I email them back with the necessary information to restore my account. It is a phishing campaign designed to collect sensitive personal information from people who are unaware of PayPal actual policies and procedures.
The identity thief wants the following information:
My Full Name
My Address
My Mother’s Maiden Name
My Date of Birth
My Social Security Number
One of my Credit or Debit Card Account Numbers, along with the issuing banks’ name, the expiration date, the Card Security Code (CSC—the little number on the back that proves that you have the physical card), and my PIN (Personal Identification Number) for that card
The more facts that a person has from this set, the easier it is for them to assume your identity. In order to protect your identity, you must be careful whom you give this information to. For instance, anyone requesting this information though an email, no matter how official looking, is suspicious.
It is not just phishing campaigns that one needs to worry about. One needs to be aware that much of this information is already available though one’s online digital footprint. And a lot of identity theft is committed by relatives and friends. Besides being careful about giving strangers this information, one needs to also regularly check their credit reports and social security summaries. The best defense against identity theft is to presume that you encounter a potential identity thief every day.