Are You Perhaps Helping To Steal Your Personal Identity

A year ago close to 8 million people in the U.S. were the victims of identity theft. Believe it or not this is good news considering in 2009 the figure topped the eleven million mark. That is a 28 percent drop.

A lot of this is a result of numerous financial institutions together with national and local authorities taking aggressive steps to track and apprehend identity thieves. There is also a determined push on a wide scale to educate consumers as to the potential risks of identity theft and what measures they can implement to protect themselves. In many cases people are doing just that no matter if it is buying some form of identity theft insurance coverage or doing a much better job of protecting their personal information.


But there is one area where people are willfully careless in regards to giving out their personal details. It is certainly not that they want their identity stolen. But the realm in which they are communicating.

Social networking has exploded with millions of online users logging on every day to talk about anything on the agenda. As a result they are being quite careless with regard to sharing their individual info. Something as simple as telling everyone your complete date of birth or providing your phone number serves as an introduction to identity thieves.

In fact scammers can also do a little bit of cloning by getting a hold of your photo and using that to create completely new accounts.

At the same time this carelessness also involves our mobile phones. There was a time when a phone was just that. But now thank to all the advancements it is now a whole lot more. In the process it has made many of us susceptible to identity fraud.

Many individuals do not have a security lock on their cellphone while others keep all types of private information without any password safeguard to discourage someone who may come across it.

If you intend to be online doing the social networking thing then be very aware of the privacy settings you have put in place and depending upon the circumstances be ready to adjust them whenever required. Also keep in mind that you can do more than your share of socializing without giving out any sensitive information. Be wary of anybody that you have placed on your list that is way too eager to get a hold of this info.

As for the cell phone, be sure to protect it by giving it some form of passcode protection. You might regard this very annoying that you have to log on every time you don't use it for an extended period however if you are going to store any kind of private information onto it then it is an annoyance that is worth putting up with.

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