Identity Theft - Keeping You an Individual

The last few years has seen the rise of a very special kind of criminal, the kind that does not break in to your home and wreck it but breaks into to your identity and ruins your life. The problem is that Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes around and the public awareness of how easy it is to have your life turned upside down is relatively low. Over the last year it has been reported that ID theft has cost the UK economy over 1.7 Billion alone.

Nearly 25% of the population in the UK either has been directly affected or knows someone who has had an identity theft incident. When a criminal steals your identity, it's not just your money that he or she can take it's a lot more damaging. A criminal may also target the following areas that will affect your credit rating preventing you from being able to obtain a loan or mortgage. You may find you have problems with your passport that will certainly affect your well-deserved holiday that you take each year or business trip.

In some cases, people have used information to obtain duplicate driving license enabling them to steal hire cars and then have them stripped down and shipped leaving you to carry the can. If someone was to hire a hundred thousand pound Ferrari using your license and then sell the car to a chop shop it would not look to good for you.

When it comes to identity theft you can not rely on someone to protect you at all you have to realize that its all down to you and that you need to make the right moves to protect yourself and your data at all times. It is important to have the ability to shred sensitive documents like bills and bank statements these are often the first type of document targeted. These documents lead to people being able to apply for credit cards in your name.

Online fraud is where you are most at risk from identity theft as the amount of information that people put online is so tempting to criminals to pick up and use. It is surprising about the amount of details people are prepared to put online in the face book profile (face book is just used as example but there are many social sites that have well exposed details available).

People are still managing to be caught by even the basic elements of Identity theft if you get an email with an attachment from someone or something you are not certain delete it. Only open email attachments from people whom you are certain of also beware of other types of email - ones claiming to be your bank or eBay. I can tell you that you only get emails from eBay in the eBay mailbox when you log in that are about your account.

Keep up to date with your anti virus and look out for news about viruses as the criminal often has a quite a substantial amount of resources to find your details. I recently had two of my websites hacked and that was quite a pain as 500 emails per hour where sent from them sites and that has cost me substantial loss of faith.

I have now rectified the problem with much stronger passwords always using the best available password generation programs. Look after your data both at home and online and make sure that you are unique and no one else is taking your identity shopping and stealing money, data and your credibility.

Andy Bolton 40 Liverpool
Hot Air Balloons
Accident Claims UK