Identity Theft

It can also be simply defined as the unauthorised use of victim’s personal information for financial gain.

It must be said that identity theft by itself is not a fraud but a means to commit frauds.

Types of Identity Theft

This can be grouped by the types of culprits

1) The employee or trusted/or authorised system users – The employees entrusted with the use of customers’ personal information could decide to sell the information to hackers for financial gain or the employee may decide to assume the stolen identity and then try obtain the victims individual’s financial benefits.

2) The hackers – The hackers are the professional criminals who employ various means or methods both technical and non-technical, to obtain personal information. Such information is used to obtain financial gains illegally.

3) Others – The two previous types of identity theft get the personal information of their victims through their official position or by intentionally seeking for the information. The third group are the criminally minded individuals who just probably came across the material that contains the information of their victim e.g. a lost purse or wallet a lost identity card by the owner e.t.c.

How Identity Thieves obtain their victim’s personal information

i) The most common source of personal information to hackers is the information obtained from business and other government institutions either through hacking, or stealing, or bribing the employees or through social engineering.

ii) The Identity thief may steal the victim’s wallet

iii) It may be obtained by intercepting mails despatched by post or if the mail is wrongly sorted at the post office by the postal employees.

iv) It may be obtained by intercepting and reading of e-mail. This is due to the insecurity nature of e-mail protocol – STMP.

v) Where an authorised user/employee uses his/her position to steal personal information of his/her employer’s customers sells it to hackers for financial gain.

vi) They also obtain it from your home computer through hacking, social engineering or abuse their relationship as your friends to steal your personal information.

How to avoid being a victim of an identity theft

The only message for you if you do not want to be a victim of an identity theft is vigilance. You need to be monitoring your credit position. Request for it once a year and confirm that there are no strange information about you. This is made possible by the recent amendment to the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Acts.

Other day to day behaviour that you must imbibe

You need to be aware of simple tips about information security and through this, you must do the following:

i) Do not use an easily guessed password like your birthday, your wife’s birthday for your online banking or credit card

ii) Your personal information is for you alone. That is why it is referred to as personal information. Do not disclose it to even your friend.

iii) Beware of social engineering. This is an anonymous caller on phone pretending to be somebody working to help you, like your companies or bank database administrator, with the hope of collecting your personal information. Similar this but done using e-mail is known as Phishing.

iv) You have every right to ask some relevant questions from your potential suppliers or even, your employer on their privacy policy so that it will help conclude when to release your personal information.

v) Keep your sensitive documents or items like wallets or purse that contains your personal information in a secured place

vi) Release your personal information when it is absolutely necessary especially your Social Security Number.

vii) When going out, make sure you carry only items that are needed with you.

viii) Do not store your personal information on your computer. Store them in a removable disc drive and store in a secured place.

When your personal information is to be kept for whatever reason, then you must implement the following:

1) Always disconnect your computer from the internet when not in use.

2) Install antivirus software to keep away all viruses. Make sure that the antivirus is updated regularly.

3) Install a spyware removal to guard against those who will like to monitor your computer or surfing behaviour secretly.

4) Install a firewall to allow only those you would like to have access to your computer network.

5) In fact, your need to keep your store information unreadable to unauthorised people.

6) Anytime you are disposing off any material containing your personal information, you have to destroy it securely. Do not just drop papers into your waste bin without shredding it and neither should you just erase the information contained in your computer media. There are some reputable companies that handle it.