Credit and Identity Theft

Identity theft is the fastest growing white-collar crime in America! This rapidly escalating crime can potentially damage your credit and good name - costing you time and money. Identity thieves use your social security number, address, even your medical records to run up thousands of dollars worth of debt - in your name.

Today's computer systems are an easy target for stealing identities. Identity thieves have many ways of stealing your identity from your computer. There are hundreds of different hacker tools and spyware programs that can track your every keystroke, capture credit card information, and search out home addresses, social security numbersand dates of birth. Some hacker tools simply wait on your computer watching and listening for the right keystroke patterns and for personal information entered on website data entry forms. And other hacker tools will send this personal information back to the hacker automatically upon discovering valuable data.

To make things worse, the newest viruses and worms spreading around the Internet infecting millions of computers have built-in hacker tools and spyware to find all the private information it can about you, and then automatically send your information back to the virus creator.

Have you heard of the term "phishing"? A Phish virus is an email that tricks users into entering personal informationand submitting it to the sender of the email. With these fake emails, the creator of the virus is "phishing" for personal information from naÔve people. Several major banks like Citibank and Bank of America have been casualties of these types of Phish viruses, where banking customers have been duped into entering their private information into a fake websiteclaiming to be the bank. You don't have to be targeted by identity thieves to become a victim! Leaving your computer unprotected against these types of hacker tools leaves you at a major risk that your identity will be stolen at some point.

Individuals and small businesses have become prime targetsfor credit card theft in recent years. For businesses, an experienced hacker, can easily get customer lists, including credit card information, addresses, emails and other private data. The fact is that business and personal computers left unprotected give hackers a free passto stealing credit cards and either using them or selling them on the black market. Credit cards are stolen from computer hard drives, not while being used in a purchase on the web! Buying things off the web is actually very safe. You are just as much at risk buying something from a retail store in a mall as you are when buying online. This is becausevirtually every business stores your information on their computers and also has access to the Internet, even if it's just for email, and is vulnerable to hack attacks. It's what businesses and consumers don't do to protect their own computer systems that cause credit theft problems.

FACTS:

. Identity theft is the fastest growing white-collar crime in America.

. 1 in 20 adults in the U.S. are now victims of identity theft. (FTC)

. 27.3 million Americans have been victims of identity theft in the last 5 years, including nearly 10 million people during 2003. (FTC)

. It costs an average of $10,000 and 75 hours of time for an individual to try to recover from identity theft.

. There has never been a recorded case where a credit card number has been stolen while being submitted for a purchase on the Internet.

. There is an online black market for stolen credit cards. Stolen credit cards go for as little as $5 to $40.