3 Reasons Why Identity Theft is a Real Risk

You Are Well-Adjusted

If you are reading this, chances are that you’re either employed or self-employed, make a decent living and know a couple of people. This fact alone puts you at greater risk of losing your identity as compared to, let’s say, someone living in a cabin in Point Barrow, Alaska; and in case you are wondering, here is why:

The probability of your identity getting stolen is directly proportional to how connected you are in real and online world.

Criminals (identity thieves, to be specific) impersonate you with the intention of availing benefits that come with being who you are. The benefits include your credit cards, bank accounts, medical insurance and a great many resources in the form of your personal connections that can be blackmailed or extorted into giving money. Thieves have no business stealing identities of isolated people. They look for normal targets that can easily be googled or found on social networks. If that sounds anything like you, you’re at risk!

You’re Retired… and Stupid

To the identity thieves, there’s nothing better than a prey that’s pliable to the point of naivety, and retired people who borderline on senility are a perfect target. If you don’t fit this profile, you better watch out for your grandma who might be giving out details of her savings account to foreign crooks posing as medical reps selling miracle pills for her arthritis. Old people

are less likely to keep a tab on their financial accounts. Since they don’t spend all their waking time online or playing with their smartphones, they are less likely to respond to notification emails or text messages their banks might send. By the time they realize they’ve been duped, it’s usually too late to chargeback.

You Think Jesus Invented the Internet

While internet is a really cool place, it is not of divine origins! If you were born in the so-called Internet Age, chances are that you trust internet blindly. It is not really a “˜for the people by the people’ kind of technology. It is more like “˜made by few for the rest of us’ kind of technology. Editing a typo on Wikipedia does not count as having contributed to the Internet which brings us to our point:  Everything you see online, including this awesome piece of text, was created by a handful of us for the rest of the humanity – relatively speaking. While mainstream places such as Apple iTunes store might be safe (to some extent), there are millions of ways to get oneself screwed online. That cool application you downloaded from the Android Market might be collecting your personal information secretly and delivering it periodically to an identity thief.

Think of Identity Theft as an STD: Socially Transmitted Disease. If you poke around a lot on social networks and have a fair share of digital trash buried in electronic landfill sites on the internet, you should get protection. Firewalls, Antivirus, and Spam Filters should be followed by a professional grade ID Theft Protection service and maybe a credit monitoring program as well.