Some of the information written here might shock you, some of it might make you laugh and still others, will simply make you nod your head with a calm affirmation as if saying, ’yep, that’s for sure.’ Identity theft: that’s a surefire issue still. What with the rise of the internet, it’s become easier and easier to steal someone’s identity, go into someone’s bank account, take someone’s house, erase someone literally from the face of the planet! (Well, at least the digital planet).
What does someone do? How to go about instilling identity theft restoration in your life? How do you get your life back?
Keep an Eye on Your Credit Cards!
Should be a no-brainer, really. But you’d be surprised how many shoppers accidentally leave their cards at the cashier’s. Your friendly teen point-of-sale fresh face might be a skilled, true-blue titanic hacker ready to squash your whole line of credit into dust if you walk out that department store door without your plastic.
You may walk back into the store with all the pandemonium of shopping and never really realize that you left it on the counter, because it probably won’t be there. Then you’ll second guess yourself: maybe you left it in the fitting room, maybe you left it at the coffee shop, the food court, the movie theater! Dear God, you’ve lost your credit card–to a hacker behind the counter.
Buy a Shredder!
And that’s one of the ‘yep, that’s for sure’ ones. Obviously. The tried-and-true methods of identity theft would be to rifle through someone’s garbage. An identity thief would strike gold if going through a big black bag full of passwords, user names, account numbers and other goodies. That’s like candy.
You’ve got the all-purpose shredder, and that same thief would need a whole lot of glue to figure out how all the little strips are put together just to figure out if that ’6′ is really a ’6′ and not an ’8′–if he or she even gets lucky enough to figure out that it could be a ’6′ or an ’8′! And then that thief would have to do some of that same deduction for about nine, or 10, or 20 other digits. Hard work. Yes, a paper shredder is crucial.
Watch Your E-mail Carefully!
You can bet everyone laughs at this–not at the prospect of getting scammed, but the lengths in which some will go to scam you! Don’t deny it–you get them in your INBOX all the time. Everyone does. They’re called e-mail scams. And they can be quite funny.
Usually they masquerade as your bank, or some other organization–typically from Zimbabwe or Poland–about a fund of a ton of money in your name. Sure. And then they ask you for their personal information. Sure. Click delete; move on.
Protect Yourself
It is, however, no joke. You never know what lurks around the cyberspace corner. How do you protect yourself in this century?