Identityfraudresources.com

Why is Identity Theft of more concern to me than being mugged at the mall?

The simple answer is, Id Fraud, sometimes called Identity Theft and Fraud, is the fraudulent and deliberate assumption of another person’s identity, including their personal information (i.e., name, date of birth, social security number, credit card numbers and/or online credit score, bank account numbers, etc.).

The reason we should be concerned is, unlike muggers at the mall who must be physically near you, the online theft of your identity can be initiated and carried out from anywhere on the planet. What’s more, the ability to apprehend and prosecute fraud cases lags far behind most other crimes.

One important reason for this is, we are just not reporting fraud because most times we don’t even know we are victims until it’s too late.

More About Identity Theft

Identity thieves main goal is to gain access to their victims’ credit information (in order to commit credit fraud) or possibly to frame them for criminal activities the thieves may themselves be involved in.

Less commonly, stolen identities are used to foster illegal immigration, terrorism, espionage or simply to allow someone to assume a new identity permanently (social security fraud).

Id fraud usually occur when the perpetrator uses that stolen information to obtain money or goods and services, on and offline, without incurring any personal financial debt or risk. Couple this with the low risk of being caught and prosecuted mentioned before and you’ll quickly see why identity protection is almost mandatory in today’s social environment.

Identity scams may also be used as means of blackmail, especially if medical privacy or political privacy has been compromised. Sadly, because most of our children and young teens have “virgin identities”, i.e. they have not established any credit profiles, child identity theft is fast becoming a significant problem.

As of this writing, there seems to be no concrete ways to prevent identity theft. We can only initiate identity protection steps such as taking advantage of a free annual credit report and enrolling in a credit service monitoring program. Sadly, some “free” credit report companies are themselves coming under fire for suspicious activities. Who can you trust?

SIDEBAR: Is it Id Theft or Fraud?

As ridiculous as it may seem, there are some objections to the use of the term “Identity Theft.” The main reason some objectors give is:

A person’s physical being and characteristics are not things that can be stolen: victims don’t cease being who they are. Rather, the phrase is used to refer to the impersonation of these unique characteristics for the purpose of credit theft, harassment, etc.

They would rather us use the term “identity fraud.” We say to those individuals, So what? Six of these, half a dozen of those, what’s the difference? Everyone agrees on one thing, being victims of identity theft is very serious. We must educate ourselves about any programs that afford us any means to prevent identity fraud.

We concede that, technically, the latter term is more accurate, however, because popular culture has dictated that society recognize the crime as “identity theft”, we are just going with the flow. Let’s face it, what we call it is hardly the battle we need to be fighting.

To continue on, have you ever asked yourself why does this ‘white collar crime’ occurs so easily? The short answer, The Information Age is upon us. Here is one scary reason why the Internet is becoming the most popular resource for id thieves.

There are legal web sites that sell Social Security numbers, sometimes for as little as $20! They are found in records called “credit headers”, and believe it or not, they are sold by credit reporting agencies to information brokers! These headers include name and name variations, current and former addresses, telephone numbers (including unlisted numbers), year and month of birth, and SSN. At this time, there are no restrictions on the sale of credit headers to information brokers.

Can consumers “opt-out” of the sale of their credit header data? Not likely! The information broker industry adopted a voluntary privacy policy in 1997, but it has been ineffective in restricting the sale of sensitive personal information to the general public. More on this may be found at: http://www.irsg.org/.(See the Individual Reference Services Group guidelines).

Is there any wonder why even some Federal Government Agencies are starting to refer to Identity Theft as “The Crime Of The Century”?

Don’t fret yourself however. There are companies like Prepaid Legal Services, Lifelock etc that market quite affordable Identity Protection packages for individuals and their families. Some companies like to call their programs “id theft insurance“, this is erroneous since they are not underwritten as such and therefore escape the government regulations true policies are subjected to.

Visit Pre-paid Legal’s Identity Theft Shield by clicking the link. This package provides the best credit monitoring service in our humble opinion.

This “White-Collared Crime Of The Century” is here to stay, with or without your permission. Accept it, embrace it and learn to recognize the signs of identity fraud and theft before it’s too late.