IDENTITY THEFT

PART 4 - How You Can Protect Yourself?
By Elaine Currie, BA (Hons)

Identity fraud (also commonly known as identity theft) in the UK costs the country an estimated £1.3 billion a year. A quarter of UK adults know someone who has been the victim of identity theft or have themselves suffered as a result of having their identity stolen and misused. Identity theft is a crime which exists both offline and on the Internet. The menace of identity theft is growing but a recent survey show that 33% of adults in the UK take no precautions to protect themselves against this crime.

In Parts 1-3 of this series, we looked at the meaning of "identity" in the context of identity fraud (aka identity theft), different types of identity theft and ways in which identity theft is committed. In Part 4, the final part of this series, we will look at some simple things we can do to protect ourselves from identity theft.

How to protect your identity

Never give out personal details to anyone who phones you. Always insist upon ringing the company back on a telephone number you have previously used for them. A genuine caller will not object to this type of security measure.

No bank, building society or any other reputable company would email you to ask you to confirm sensitive details. Report any such request to the company at an address you know to be valid. Online companies such as ebay and Paypal have dedicated "spoof" reporting email addresses for this type of attempted identity theft.

If you are an Internet banking user, avoid accessing accounts from Internet cafes. It is a simple matter for keystroke logging hardware to be installed there. Also avoid downloading games or useful toolbars from the Internet, they can be a way of installing keystroke logging software on your own computer.

Do not use the same password for all your accounts. This goes for Internet and offline accounts. If an identity thief finds out your password for one account, he is unlikely to resist the temptation to try the password out for any other accounts he knows you own.

Never keep a note of your PIN with your ATM cash card or credit card. If you keep a note of your PIN with your card in your wallet and the wallet is stolen, your bank will not be liable for any fraudulent withdrawals from your account: you would have to bear the loss yourself.

Do not use your mother's maiden name or father's middle name as a security check item. Anyone can find these out from your birth certificate. It is best to avoid using as a password any word which exists in the dictionary as there is software which can attempt to access your accounts by running through all the words to be found in the dictionary.

When setting up passwords it is best to use a combination of letters and numbers and, if the account permits it, symbols. This makes it impossible for the "dictionary word" software to accidentally hit upon your password. Remembering this type of password can be tricky. One way of overcoming this is to use the first letter of each word in a line from a favourite poem or song. With any luck it will spell complete nonsense. If not, you can make it harder to break the code by exchanging some letters for numbers, eg change l into 1 and o into 0. For example, using "Come on baby light my fire" gives us coblmf as a password. That then becomes c0b1mf. There are many variations on inventing a password, it just needs to be simple for you to figure out if you forget it but not so easy for an identity thief to guess.

Your rubbish is the identity thief's treasure. Last month's electricity bill might be worth nothing to you but to the identity thief it is a vital element of proof of identity. Believe it or not, there are documented cases of people who earn a living from the sale of documents they have stolen from rubbish sacks. These people are known as bin raiders (called dumpster divers in the USA). I discovered recently that the borough in which I live has the highest incidence of identity theft in the whole of England. Since I made that discovery I have wondered how much this is due to our local authority's recycling policy. It must be much more convenient (and pleasant) for thieves to select documents from a recyclable paper bin rather than having to dig them out from the bacon rind and vegetable parings in the general kitchen waste.

Before you throw out any document which bears any personal details (even your electricity account number) shred it or at the very least rip it up and obliterate the account number. Before you throw out an expired credit card, cut it into pieces. In the UK only 31% of people shred documents and use different passwords for their accounts. How difficult is it to run a piece of paper through a shredder or rip it up before binning it?

If the worst happens it is better to find out sooner rather than later. The most obvious and simple way to discover identity fraud at an early stage is to make it a matter of routine to check your bank, credit card and building society statements as soon as you receive them.

When it comes to identity theft, carelessness costs cash. It is beyond our power to protect ourselves from insider identity fraud or robbery but we can, by being aware and taking simple precautions, limit the danger of becoming victims of identity theft.

That is the end of this series of articles on the subject of identity theft. I hope these articles have served as a reminder of how easy it is to become the victim of identity theft in one form or another but, equally, how simple it is to take precautions against the identity thief.

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By Elaine Currie
You may republish this article only in its
entirety and with this resource box intact

Elaine Currie provides ideas, help and resources
for anyone wanting to work at home
visit: http://www.Huntingvenus.com
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