Identity theft is becoming an increasingly common problem in the United Kingdom, as fraudsters discover more and more ways to get hold of the information which is required to steal someone’s identity.
Identity theft rarely involves the unauthorised taking of a victim’s personal possessions, however it does involve the perpetrator of the crime taking the victim’s personal information and then using this in an unauthorised way for their own personal gain.
So, if before the Internet era the most awful thing somebody could steal from a person was the wallet with some money, ID and another bunch of random stuff, now it is more damaging to steal one’s identity. This means personal information about cards, passwords and the ability of becoming somebody else in the online community.
Identity thieves can also use your identity when they commit other crimes, such as entering (or exiting) a country illegally, trafficking drugs, smuggling other substances, committing cyber crimes, laundering money and much more. In fact, they can use your identity to commit almost any crime imaginable in your name.
Some techniques that people use in identity theft are:
- Recovering personal data from dismissed or returned IT equipment and storage media including PCs, servers, PDAs, mobile phones, USB memory sticks and hard drives that have been disposed of carelessly at public dump sites, given away or sold on without having been properly sanitized
- Using public records about individual citizens, published in official registers such as electoral rolls
- Stealing bank or credit cards, identification cards, passports, authentication tokens
- Common-knowledge questioning schemes that offer account verification and compromise: “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”, “what was your first car model?”, or “What was your first pet’s name?”, etc.
- Using ‘contactless’ credit card readers to acquire data wirelessly from RFID-enabled passports
- Stealing personal information from computers using breaches in browser security or malware such as Trojan horse keystroke logging programs or other forms of spyware
- Hacking computer networks, systems and databases to obtain personal data, often in large quantities
- Using false pretences to trick individuals, customer service representatives and help desk workers into disclosing personal information and login details or changing user passwords/access rights (pretexting)
- Guessing Social Security numbers by using information found on Internet social networks such as Facebook or Twitter
- Low security/privacy protection on photos that are easily clickable and downloaded on social networking sites.
- Befriending strangers on social networks and taking advantage of their trust until private information is given.
Most of these problems are a result of low privacy settings on social media platforms and surfing websites that are not trustworthy.
By the time you realise that someone out there is buying things, obtaining a credit from a bank or committing crimes in your name, there is so little left to be done.
Protect your accounts! Better safe than sorry!
Network Society and the Media 
This post reminded me of a lot of the topics we discussed in various weeks. It made me think of the terms and conditions agreements that we passively accept and also had me recalling topics of our online identity/visibility. Many are not informed of these concerns and the online platform has given criminals another tool to obtaining our information. Looking at your list of ways people use identity theft, it is clear that we need to be more aware of our online visibility. It is crazy to see what comes up when you google yourself; old addresses, pictures, phone numbers. This post also made me think of how not only do we need to be worrying about our credit cards and addresses, but also how our pictures can be stolen and used as a fake identity. It is a shame how some people negatively take advantage of technology.
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Whether we’ve done an excessive amount of online shopping (impossible), or have downloaded some service onto our laptops, I think most of us have already gotten to the point where we can’t even remember all of the websites we’ve entered our credit card information to. This post reminded me of this American Underworld video I saw a while ago where a credit card scammer/identity thief agrees to do a documentary and allows the camera man to follow him through his surprisingly very easy process of stealing hundreds of dollars from random people all over the country. The facility that he does all this with is pretty frightening.
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This worries me too, to be fair. No matter how comfortable it is to shop online I still hesitate every time I have to put my credit card information in. I stop and ask myself, ‘could I do this another way?’. It annoys me how many companies have opted for using the online payment option as the only one. I feel like in the future identity theft is going to be one of the most prominent problems.
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