Identity theft can occur in a variety of ways, people usually find out they have been victimized when it is too late to begin protecting themselves. With more and more people connecting to the internet every year the opportunities for identity thieves are never scarce. The internet has provided a great number of benefits to the world but along with these benefits come the ongoing risks of online identity fraud. The internet is only one medium that enables thieves to steal identities but it isn’t the only one, there are many other causes of identity theft.

Pre-Approved Credit Offers

Your personal information is traded between merchants, credit providers and the credit bureaus and unfortunately there is no law that can stop this practice, it can only be regulated. But these regulations do not properly address the security of your information as it gets exchanged. Pre-approved credit offers are one of the easiest ways to become a victim of identity theft because often these offer letters do not make it to their intended destination. Also, they are often thrown away whole, sometimes still in their envelopes. This risk can be avoided by shredding every piece of paper that contains any information of yours, but it would be best to simply opt out of pre-approved offers and one of the most convenient ways to accomplish this is when you enroll in an identity protection plan, since the plans will take care of removing your name from all pre-approved offers and junk mail lists.

Accessing to Public Records

Public records are the information that’s freely and easily available to anyone. This includes bankruptcy records, court records, fictitious name filings, marriage registration, real estate property records etc. All of this information can be accessed by anyone and it is often available at no cost. A person can get a great deal of detail about you from these records and it can be utilized to get credit or redirect your mail to an alternate location where an identity thief can receive it and learn even more about you.

Online Phishing Scams

One of the most common causes of identity theft is online phishing. This is still an effective method for identity thieves. If you have a Paypal account, you have more than likely received an email at one point or another asking you to verify your information by following a link that’s provided in the body of the email. Once you go to the website and enter in your information you’re typically redirected to a page that tells you that your information has been verified leaving you to think that you did the right thing, when in fact you just rendered your login information to the thief who operates the site. These emails are normally written to give the recipient a sense of urgency, normally expressed in the subject line that says something to the effect of “your account has been compromised” and that you must verify it now before it gets suspended. It’s a good trick that’s worked very effectively over the last five years, but more people are becoming aware that these are nothing more than identity fraud attempts.

Spear Phishing Scams

Because phishing alone is no longer as effective, identity thieves have become more resourceful and have gone so far as to target individuals specifically. This is normally done when they have learned more about the victim and realize that there’s potential for high gains by gathering even more information rather than just steal a credit card number. If identity thieves believe that you have major assets they might be able to exploit they will use more sophisticated methods for getting you to voluntarily surrender your information. This can be in the form of a direct phone call or an official looking letter from your financial institution in which they list information that looks and sounds official. They could also use public record information to inform themselves about you and sell you on the idea that they are a legitimate party trying to solve an issue for you.

Internet Security and Old Browsers

Another one of the common causes of identity theft are internet users who are simply not aware of the dangers of being connected to the internet without the proper protection. To protect against identity theft properly everyone needs to have Antivirus and firewall protection to keep malicious programs from entering your computer system. There are a number of malicious programs that can be installed on your system in passive mode that can compromise your personal information. Programs such as keyloggers are one of the many ways hackers get access to your information. These programs record every keystroke you type especially when you’re online then transfer this information to the thief. In other words any information you type can be seen by someone else including bank account login information, credit accounts and any other online destinations you normally access.

Old browsers are another serious problem that you have to address, but luckily it’s a simple fix. The older versions of Internet Explorer have a series of security holes and no one should ever access the internet using Internet Explorer 6 or below. All browsers are free to download and install, among the safest browsers available are Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Although no browser is 100% secure, you have more security features in Firefox and Opera.

Spam and pirated software

No matter how long you’ve been online, you probably have heard the word spam a number of times. Spam is a term used to describe the unsolicited emails that you receive on a daily basis that typically promote products. Spam is also a danger because of malicious code that can potentially run when you open these emails. Often these products are pirated popular software that’s offered at a huge discount. Even if you don’t buy the software, accessing the destination sites in these emails can be dangerous if your computer system is not properly protected. Also using pirated software is an easy way to fall prey to identity thieves. The software that you download free from these sites is often coded with Trojans that work silently gathering your sensitive data. So even though it may sound like a good offer, you’re better off deleting spam.

By now you should know that identity theft criminals know no boundaries. Child identity theft is a particularly disturbing and very dangerous crime for these small victims. To put it plainly, it can ruin the youngster’s life before it even begins.

A research study conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research, a leading independent provider of financial research services, announced recently on a press release titled “Increased Vigilance by Parents Needed to Protect Children’s Identities” that children are also at high risk of identity theft. Take a moment to read the press release and it should give you a good idea of how this is possible.

To give a brief summary of the findings of the above research, the study showed that out of 500 children studied by the research 5% of them had credit reports, all of which had an average $12,000 in fraudulent debts. A few victims in the study had bills and credit lines in collections. A small percentage of the subjects had mortgage loans tied to their social security numbers.

One of the biggest problems with child identity theft is that clues about the issue may not surface until years down the road. The fraudulent accounts may go undetected for a long time and all of this can cause very serious consequences for the child when they get older mostly in terms of credit worthiness.

Parents typically do not consider this an issue because children do not have credit files, but the risks are real no matter what age the victim is.  So it is absolutely necessary for parents to take the same preventive measures they use to protect their information and ensure their child’s identity is protected.

If the crime goes undetected for an extended period,  the child will encounter the same problems anyone with bad credit will experience in their adult life, being denied employment, college tuition loans, or any other type of credit.

Protecting a child’s identity is not as difficult as protecting an adult’s, it all starts with careful handling of their information at home, most places in possession of children’s sensitive information are medical facilities, schools, and membership clubs. Anyone else that requests the information of your children should provide a very good reason for it.

If you have not had the chance to read about those prevention steps, take a moment to download our “free identity theft prevention guide”. You’ll find many of the basic steps you need to follow now to protect your identity and that of your child’s.

When identity theft protection services first became available they were marketed pretty aggressively, and it is perhaps due to these efforts that consumers may have looked past the actual benefit of the offers and gone to dismiss the announcements as yet another product pedaled by financial companies.

With the ongoing threat of identity theft, by now more and more people are starting to pay attention to the possible consequences of identity theft should it happen to them. So they’re probably now wondering, do identity theft protection services really work? Do I really need to spend the money to outsource protecting my identity? There unfortunately isn’t a straight answer to these questions. The needs, lifestyles and risks vary too much.

Identity theft cases are constantly in the news and the incidents vary from city clerks involved in criminal rings that steal identities to parents stealing the identities of their own children. People you do business with and those around you are as much likely to be the thieves as someone half way around the world.

If identity theft is a real concern for you, consider first taking on the task of implementing proactive and continuous efforts to secure your own identity. You can first start by following our own “Identity Theft Prevention Guide”, which is available for free to all our readers. This short guide will provide you with a basic list of things you need to be doing right now to protect your own identity.

The guide will prove that many of the prevention steps an identity theft protection company will do for you, you can do yourself. The difference in the two is the accuracy and effectiveness of their state of the art technology that helps to provide services that no individual can provide for themselves.

If the tasks listed on the guide are more than you can handle, then you need to consider outsourcing the task and this can prove beneficial and effective for your overall protection.

What identity theft protection services do:
•    Monitor credit reports to detect suspicious activities
•    Place and renew fraud alerts on your credit files with all three credit bureaus
•    Monitor online identity black markets
•    Assist when you lose your wallet or purse
•    Remove your name from unwanted mail/marketing lists
•    Opt you out of pre-approved credit offers
•    Provide medical benefits protection (only Trusted ID so far)
•    Extend protection for your family as well (Trusted ID and Identity-Truth)

These and other security features are automated for you so you don’t have to do it yourself. However the biggest benefit of these services besides the peace of mind you get from knowing you’re protected is the insurance policy or service warranty, which can range from $20,000 to $1,000,000 in case your identity does get compromised.

So do these services work? Yes they work, however they’re not 100% safe since identity thieves are becoming more and more resourceful and criminal rings are resorting to unconventional methods of identity theft which include bribing social workers, medical staff and financial clerks. It is best that you have some level of protection that includes a policy that will help you monetarily recover from an incident.

The risk of becoming an identity theft victim, as we rediscover from time to time, does not end when a person passes on.  Losing a loved one is always devastating, and of all the things that could bring up memories of their lives, calls from creditors about loved ones is not something many would expect. No one ever imagines receiving a call from a collections agency demanding to speak to your deceased relative because credit accounts they supposedly opened recently are delinquent.

Is this a prank? You ask, but it is not. How did this happen? How did your deceased relative apply for and get a new Visa card and forget to pay the bill? 90% of the time it is not a mistake or a prank. This is the work of modern-day grave robbers, identity thieves who stop at nothing to take advantage of someone else’s identity.

How does this happen? Obituaries printed in local newspapers give short descriptions about the lives people leave behind, an identity thief could either randomly pick any name and research it on public records, which are freely available to all, for more information on the victim’s previous locality and in many cases their social security number is also retrievable. Armed with this information it does not matter if the victim is 6 feet under or vacationing in Aruba, the rest is easy for the identity thief.

Authorities believe that cases like this are rare and it is recommended that families of deceased identity theft victims act immediately and put a “fraud alert” on their relatives credit file. In cases like this there are still many types of identity theft that can happen on the credit files and with the social security numbers of the deceased for many years.

There are many types of identity theft that have not been uncovered yet, but with fraud alerts in place, the identity thieves are met with more obstacles. When fraud alerts are detected by companies that obtains credit information about an applicant, they’ll be alerted right away of the possibility of fraud. Typically this will trigger the company to do further verifications on the applicant by contacting the person directly.
When your loved ones pass on the last thing you worry about is that they would be victimized again in any way, but it is possible and it happens a lot with criminal rings who work in with the aid of social and medical workers to obtain information like social security numbers and credit card information.

What you can do to protect your deceased loved one? Here’s a quick list of things families can do to avoid this from tarnishing the memory of their loved ones:
•    Never provide specific details about your loved ones in their obituaries. Only provide the year of their birth, not the day and month. Also never provide their address, this is plenty of information for a thief to get started.
•    Contact the social security administration and inform them of the death of your loved one. Once the administration is informed they will always have a record that can be referenced in case the number is used. The social security administration can be contacted at 1-800-772-1213. You must be ready to provide the “death certificate” of your loved one should they request it.
•    Contact the credit card companies and banking institutions where you loved one did business and inform them as well. Their credit accounts and bank accounts should be frozen or closed. Again make sure you have a copy of the death certificate handy.
•    Contact all three credit bureaus and either fax them or mail them a copy of the death certificate. Find more information on how to contact the credit bureaus on our identity theft victims resources page.
•    Contact the DMV in your state and cancel the driver’s license and insist that they block any duplicates from being produced.
•    It would also be wise to order a copy of your loved ones credit report about a month after the death and following again a few more times in the following year.

Illegal immigration has a long and controversial history in the US, the topics surrounding illegal immigration concentrate on social and political aspects more so than anything else. But one issue that perhaps does not get enough light is the fact that illegal immigrants are a major cause of ID theft.

The social security numbers they use to get employment are sold to them by identity theft criminals and in many cases they simply put together a random 8 digit number and sometimes they just happen to be the number belonging to an actual person. Although they simply do not know any better, the issue remains that the victims affected by their actions face serious consequences when their information is used. The financial burdens, emotional distress and often legal proceedings are more than anyone should bare due to someone else’s ignorance of the law.

Federal law imposes a mandatory two year prison sentence on anyone who commits identity fraud. An article on the NY Times talks about Supreme Court Justices who are not sure whether workers who use Social Security and alien registration numbers must know that they belong to someone else to be prosecuted and be subject to the two year prison sentence.

There is a flaw in the way the law is stated for it says that the law makes it a crime to “knowingly” or without lawful authority use a means of identification of another person. Federal appeals courts in Boston, San Francisco and Washington interpret the law as “the prosecution must prove the defendant knew the social security number belonged to another person to be found guilty”.

Should they or should they not be held accountable for using someone else’s identification even if they did not know it? Not knowing the law or being aware of wrong doings has never been a good excuse in any court of law in the United States.  The crime is still Identity Theft and the victims are real people with real lives who are being negatively impacted by this crime whether committed by someone who knows they’re doing something wrong or not.