What Is Identity Theft?
Now imagine having your entire identity stolen. Your social security number, business ID number, access to your personal and business bank accounts, retirement accounts - swiped out from under you. Your personal and business cards can be maxed out too. What's worse, you could lose your client database, financial records and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled. That's identity theft.
Now imagine what would happen if you had to invest an enormous amount of time, money, effort and energy to try to restore your credit and good reputation. Think about how much your business would suffer if one day your payroll money or the money you use to pay vendors was stolen out from under you.
Or what if an online criminal stole your identity and used it to pull off other criminal acts? Could your business survive a front-page news story about how you or your company ripped off hundreds of people? Though you might be "innocent until proven guilty" in the justice system, you are "guilty until proven innocent" in the media.
About 1 in every 30 people will experience identity theft every year. And with new and clever technologies developing all the time, this number could increase.
Take a look at these statistics...
- As many as 9 million Americans have their identities stolen every year. (Source: The United States Federal Trade Commission)
- The dollar amount of identity fraud over the last two years totals over $100 billion.(Source: Javelin Strategy and Research)
- 11.6% of all identity theft (over 1 million cases) occurs online (with the remainder of personal information being stolen by more traditional methods like stealing wallets or overhearing a social security number). (Source: Javelin Strategy and Research)
- It takes the average victim of identity theft more than 600 hours - that's equivalent to nearly 3 months of 40-hour workweeks - to clear their name and clean up the fraud conducted with their personal information. (Source: Javelin Strategy and Research)
- Because identity theft and Internet fraud are often misclassified crimes, a culprit has only a 1 in 700 chance of being caught by the federal government. (Source: Gartner Survey, 2003)
- Cybercriminals stole an average of $900 from each of 3 million Americans in the past year, and that doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of PCs rendered useless by spyware. (Source: Gartner Group)
How Online Identity Thieves Get Hold Of Your Information
Some identity theft does occur through more "old-school" methods such as stealing your wallet, raiding your business files, overhearing you give a credit card or social security number over the phone, or even raiding your business file cabinet. However, common-sense tactics such as avoiding public conversations that involve your personal or business financial information or putting locks on your file cabinets can be used to combat those threats.
Internet threats, on the other hand, are much more sophisticated and involve greater "know-how" in order to prevent them.
There are 3 basic ways cybercriminals gain access to your personal information over the web. They are:
- Phishing - Phishing is where online scammers send spam or pop-up messages to your computer and try to get you to provide personal or sensitive business information over the web. Online criminals will typically send messages that look like legitimate messages from your bank, credit card company or other financial institution. In the message, there is usually a web site link where it asks you to update your contact information
- E-mail Scams - Offers, detailed sales pitches, links to informational web sites. These seemingly harmless e-mails are actually the makings of an Internet crime. They'll ask for your credit card information to buy a fake product or to pay for shipping on a "free" gift.
- Spyware - Spyware is software installed on your computer without your consent to monitor or control your computer use. Clues that spyware is on a computer may include a barrage of pop-ups, a browser that takes you to sites you don't want, unexpected toolbars or icons on your computer screen, keys that don't work, random error messages and sluggish performance when opening programs or saving files. In some cases, there may be no symptoms at all.