The world runs on information, and no amount of wishful thinking will completely hide you from that fact. However there are some practices that are best. We should take responsibility for our places of exposure and vulnerability, or the attackable surface, of our personal information.
Along with the things you do every day — from employing a smartphone to swiping a debit card — can cause you to be exposed and vulnerable to scammers, and finally, identity theft.
Based on what we do, and how we do it, those places become smaller or bigger . Here’s a summary of ways than we know criminals normally capture their victim’s information.
1. Pick up a telephone, respond to your text, click on a link or supply information that is personal and we don’t know who the sender was;
2. Fail to correctly fix computers or mobile devices (smartphones, tablets or laptops);
3. Create easy-to-crack passwords;
4. Lose rather than shred a file;
5. Respond to an email that directs a number to be called by us we can not independently support;
6. Save our user ID or password as a shortcut for future login and fail to properly protect it;
7. Use our email address as a user name/ID, if we’ve the option to modify it;
8. Use straightforward personal identification numbers like 9876 or 1234 or a birthday;
9. Forget to get, review and correct our credit reports;
10. Go 24 hours without reviewing our bank and credit card accounts to make absolutely sure that every transaction we see is recognizable;
In every one of the above mentioned cases, we leave ourselves exposed to those who consider the larceny of our identity. While very serious and extremely damaging, there are many other means that the “bad guys” can cause a mess in your life and your money. Services just like the ones available from Identalocker offer protection against others creating credit or identities using your Social Security Number.
Ready to stop worrying and start getting protected?
