Identity Theives Don’t Take A Holiday
The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the biggest shopping time of the year. As we enter the season of giving there is one thing we should be stingy with – protecting our Identities!
Holiday madness, crazed shoppers and packed malls. While we are bustling from store to store and internet site to internet site trying to complete everyone’s holiday list, thieves and scammers are taking our distraction as a signal to strike. According to the author of Privacy Means Profit and identity theft expert John Sileo, “This is the easiest time of year for thieves to steal wallets, break into houses and profit financially from the season of giving without victims detecting it for a long time.”
With just three weeks until Christmas, now is the time to protect yourself and make sure that your Identity is safe from potential thieves. Just last month, Sileo was hired to speak to the Department of Defense and included some of the most important Holiday Safety Prevention Tips:
Identity Theft Statistics & Holiday Shopping
Identity theft statistics, dry as melba toast, have something to teach us about shopping this Holiday season. Listening to the media, you would think that the Internet and cybercrime are to blame for most cases of identity theft. They are biased toward technology stories because they are new and interesting (actually, they are starting to get old). If it’s not hackers and phishers, then its war driving and key logging.
But their technological bias is Wrong.
Cybercrime only accounts for 11% of actual identity fraud cases in the latest Javelin study and online shopping accounts for a meager 1%!
When it comes to victims having their identity stolen while making in-store purchases, women have a 94% incident rate and men only 43%. Women tend to shop more in stores, men online.
There is an important lesson in this confusion between reality and perception: don’t automatically believe everything you hear, especially in the media. It’s sexy to write about cybercrime, but the disproportionate amount of attention it receives gives us a false sense that it is the leading cause of identity theft. As you start your holiday shopping, don’t be afraid to shop online, but only if you have protected your computer and internet connection properly.
Here’s what you need to know:
- Technology plays a smaller role in identity theft than we perceive
Sileo In the Media
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