Identity Theft – Don’t Make A Critical Mistake
With the good comes the bad. With the explosion of the digital services age has come an explosion in a crime known as identity theft. It is now the fastest growing crime with an identity being stolen once every two seconds. That’s 15 million a year and rising quickly.
Most people picture identity theft as something that occurs when someone rifles through your garbage can looking for credit card statements or what have you. This does happen and you should shred anything that contains your personal information. The shredders are less than $50 at your local office supply store or online, so don’t be lazy with this. Still, this is not where most identities are stolen and it is a huge mistake to think that just protecting your own stuff can make a major difference in your identity theft risk. Why is this? Let’s look at an example.
The Christmas season in 2006 was a big one. This was before the Great Recession when we all still had credit, homes and unemployment was not in the teens. Ah, the good old years! Regardless, the news that broke early in 2007 was scary. …