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Identity theft crimes are not new, but they have become more persuasive in the past decade. In mid-2005, San Francisco Chronicle discovered that holders of more than 40 million credit cards were vulnerable to financial fraud because identity thieves had compromised their credit card information. Earlier that year, information and data broker, Reed Elsevier Group PLC, revealed that several hundred thousand people might have had their profiles stolen from one of its U.S. databases. One quickly learns to secure their computer networks so that these kinds of attacks, or leaks are non-existant.

Becoming a major epidemic, Identity Theft occurs when a criminal uses another person’s personal information to take on that person’s identity. Identity theft includes the misuse of a Social Security number, credit cards, mail fraud, scam, schemes, frauds, or any other form of misuse or abuse of a victim’s identity.

If your identity is stolen, your finances can quickly become a nightmare. A less obvious problem is the effect identity theft can have on your taxes.

Identity Theft

Generally, thieves steal your personal data for the purpose of running up credit card charges or opening and abusing new accounts. A developing trend in the identity theft field concerns schemes impacting your taxes.

Gartner Research, a US based research company estimated that 57 million Americans had received spurious e-mail from hackers or cyber-thieves impersonating legitimate services.

They further estimate that nearly 11 million have clicked on the link in a phishing attack email and 3 percent of those attacked remember giving personal information to the thieves.

Online identity theft is a serious crime that can clean out your life savings
and leave you with a damaged credit history that may take years to repair.
In the interim, obtaining loans, renting apartments, and even applying
for work can become increasingly difficult. Here is what you can do to
protect yourself:

With identity theft statistics currently at an all time high, and climbing, it just makes sense that we should all be doing everything we can to protect ourselves.

One of the most prevalent yet overlooked ways your personal information and passwords may be being compromised is through the presence of Spyware on your computer.

America, it’s time to take an aggressive stance in preventing identity theft! The odds of the average American becoming the victim of such an outrageous crime are greater than you might think. In fact, with today’s technology and just a little creativity, thieves can quite easily capture your personal identity for the purposes of draining your funds, charging expensive items to your credit cards and recreating their entire lives to virtually become “you”. There are effective ways to fight this epidemic – it’s just a matter of familiarizing yourself with them.

Phishing is a term used to describe a type of spam that aims to steal your identity. It can be attempted through email, instant messages, or pop-up windows. Phishers seek to convince their potential victims to provide personal data such as credit card numbers, passwords or account information.

We have heard a lot about consumers’ personal information getting into the hands of identity thieves. More and more people are taking steps to minimize their exposure to such theft by reducing information on personal checks, refusing to share social security numbers with just anyone who asks, being prudent in their use of credit cards, and shredding “junk” mail that might allow another person to pose as them. However, we can do little to protect ourselves against lackadaisical security methods or unscrupulous business practices.

Since the demise of the stock market in 2000, the real estate market has been booming. Investors who are justifiably cautious about investing in stocks have been investing in homes. This has driven the prices of homes in the United States to record levels. Long-time homeowners are discovering that they have a tremendous amount of equity in their homes as the values rise, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The past five years have been good to homeowners and lenders. Unfortunately, the past five years have also been good to equity thieves, who are using identity theft to steal the equity from homes, often without the homeowner’s knowledge.