Getting Rid of Identity Theft

Identity theft has been a crime for ages, and it will probably still exist for years to come. The biggest problem with identity theft is the amount of people who are unaware of the dangers on the internet. Make sure you are aware of the dangers and how to protect yourself. Do not keep the knowledge to yourself, the more people who know about identity theft, the harder it will be for thieves to steal and this will make identity theft a less appealing option for getting money.

Hopefully in the future better anti virus programs and firewalls are developed to keep thieves out of your computer. One of the reasons identity theft on the internet is growing so fast is because it is hard to track. It would make a huge difference to the amount of identity theft if better ways to track identity thefts were developed and laws were created to prevent sites from selling personal information.

How to Protect Your Identity

Giving out your information on the internet is very dangerous. All it takes for someone to access your credit card online is your name and number. For someone to get a loan out in your name is your address and social security number. How do people steal this information? Email scams, hacking, and fake sites are just three of the many ways.

A theft will often send out an email pretending to be from a credible company or site asking for your information. Most sites that take personal information warn you that they will never email you for the information, but many people do not know this. How do you protect yourself against email scams? The easiest way is to simply not give out your personal information over email. A more practical approach is to validate the email first, go to the site where it claims to have come from. Is it somewhere you should be giving personal information, for instance your bank? Does the site say it will ever ask you for personal information by email? If the answer to either of these questions is no, do not give out your information.

Shopping online is easy, but due to identity theft it can be very dangerous. A good idea is to use pay pal or stored value cards to pay for your purchases. Using pay pal and stored value cards allows you to control the amount of money a thief can hack into. Instead of putting your whole credit card at risk you can put only what is necessary for your purchase on the pay pal account of stored value card. If you do not feel comfortable with those options you should try and keep all your online purchases on one credit card and get watch your banking statements.

Two things you can look at before you give out information to a site are digital certificates and its privacy policy. Digital certificates show that a site has achieved a certain level of safety and tell you about where the site is coming from. The privacy policy will tell you what the site is allowed to do with the information you give it. These documents are often long, wordy, and frankly a pain to read, but it is very important that you do. You would want to know if you were about to give a site permission to sell your personal information.

A very simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe is to be aware. Read your emails and the news, you might see warnings about scams or frauds. Become aware of anti virus and hacking software. Do not go to 'bad' sites. And most importantly exercise common sense when you tell anyone any personal information.

Negative Effects of Identity Theft

There are countless negative affects of Identity Theft, in fact one can say there are two many to count. Identity Theft can damage you mentally, physically, and financially.

If your friends thought you were saying things about or too them that were not true, both of you would suffer emotionally. This can happen online when someone steals your identity. A theft can use programs such as chat rooms, msn, and myspace to pretend to be you, and since no one can see your face, they won’t know it isn’t you. The worst thing is you might not even know your identity has been stolen and won’t understand why people are acting differently towards you.

If a thief gains access to your online bank account, they can access your money and do whatever they want with it. If you don’t have security measures in place, you might not be aware that someone is stealing your money. You can lose thousands of dollars, and the loss of large sums of money. If someone has your name and credit card number, they can use your money until the credit runs out or you realize something is wrong. This money you might never get back. Identity theft can also negatively affect your credit history, and it is hard to fix the damage caused by identity theft.