‘Identity Theft Expert’ Articles

If you’re thinking “this couldn’t happen to my child,” think again! Let’s look at

Who Does This?

The identity thief is not always a stranger. In many cases, it’s a relative with bad credit who takes advantage of a child’s pristine credit. Conveniently, these family members generally have access to the information necessary to maximize the fraud with little attention.
This seems absurd, but imagine a parent who is strapped for cash, has a bad credit score and needs to buy groceries. In this case, short-term thinking blinds the relative or friend to long-term consequences. In other instances, the child’s future is not taken into consideration at all.

Frankly, it doesn’t take much to get the crime underway; all a criminal needs is the child’s name and Social Security Number. These pieces of personal information are exposed in a variety of ways:

• When registering for daycare, schools and recreational sports
• On medical, dental and hospital records
• When joining organizations like the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, etc.
• When the above information is permanently stored and accessed by volunteers or employees
• When one of the above organizations is breached by a hacker or malicious software
• When an adult befriends your child on a social networking site (MySpace, Facebook) and eventually socially engineers private information out of them

Were you surprised the other day when I said that your children are highly attractive targets of identity thieves because they have untouched and unblemished credit records?  Let me tell you just how easy it happens.

How Does It Happen?

All an identity thief needs to ruin your child’s bright financial future is her name and Social Security Number.

“Shouldn’t my child’s age show up on any credit background check, shouldn’t the merchant recognize that the person in front of them buying a car on credit isn’t seven years old?” you ask.

Yes, it should, but the people screening the credit report rarely give it the time and care necessary to detect fraud.

All too often, background checks involve simply matching the name and the Social Security Number provided. This leaves doors wide open for scandalous minds to wreak havoc on your child’s perfect credit. The most unsettling part is that the age of the applicant (in this case, the person posing as your child) becomes official with the credit bureaus upon the first credit application. This makes clearing a sabotaged credit record even more difficult because you have to prove to the credit bureau that your child is only seven and isn’t responsible for thousands of dollars of debt.

In the Privacy Calendar, the action items that are important to take to protect your identity are listed by priority rather than mind-set. The order was determined according to three criteria:

1. Which steps need to be taken first to make the process simple?
2. Which actions are most effective at preventing identity theft?
3. Which items are you most likely to complete given time and resource constraints?

The detailed information for taking each of the steps is contained in the individual mind-set chapters of Privacy Means Profit, which are shown in italics and enclosed in parentheses following the steps, for easy identification. I strongly recommend that you refer back to each chapter for in depth explanations of each step.
I also highly recommend that you set up a schedule for yourself and complete the items phase by phase. Take 10 minutes a day, one hour per week, or one weekend a month and schedule time to ‘‘accumulate privacy.’’ If you have to wait on one of the action items—for example, you order your credit report but it will be 10 days before you receive it—move on to another of the items further down the list and return to the item you skipped when you receive the report.

Privacy Means Profit (Wiley) available in bookstores today!

Here are The Top 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy It:

You love sharing bank account numbers, surfing habits and customer data with cyber thieves over unprotected wireless networks

You never tempt hackers and con artists by using Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Docs, or other cloud computing platforms to store or communicate private info, personally or professionally.

You bury your head in the sand, insisting that “insider theft” won’t affect your home or business.

You’ve already hardened your laptops and other mobile computing devices in 7 vital ways,  eliminating a major source of both personal and corporate data theft.

You have a “thing” for identity theft recovery costs and would rather invest thousands in recovery than $25 in prevention.

If you want to defend yourself and your business against identity theft, data breach and corporate espionage, then buy a copy of Privacy Means Profit.

Privacy Means Profit

Prevent Identity Theft and Secure You and Your Bottom Line

Privacy Means Profit builds a bridge between good personal privacy habits (protect your wallet, online banking, trash, etc.) with the skills and motivation to protect workplace data (bulletproof your laptop, server, hiring policies, etc.).

ThinkLikeASpy.com got a makeover!

We recently updated our website dedicated to my day job as a professional identity theft speaker and expert. The re-launch reflects the release of our new book, Privacy Means Profit, updated resources and our recent appearance on 60 Minutes.

We hope the new website will help you stay up to date on current information survival issues like social media exposure, browser espionage, cyber theft and host of other issues.

Feel free to email us with any questions, comments or feedback on the new site.

The New Features include:

• New Videos and Fraud Training
• More Customer and Video Testimonials
• Identity Theft Resources to aid in prevention and recovery
• A Downloadable Speakers Packet
• A new Identity Theft Prevention Store where you can purchase further resources for protecting yourself, your family and your business

By Mickey Murphy

Information security. Identity theft. Black hat hackers. This all sounds like three-alarm lingo from some old DC comic book: “Immediately sign over all of your wealth, or I will hack you and steal your identity!” What do these oblique, non-intuitive terms mean? Here is how Wikipedia defines them: Information security — “Protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction.” Identity theft — Fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.” Black hat hackers (also known as crackers) — “Hackers who specialize in unauthorized penetration” of computer systems, as opposed to white hat hackers who test computer systems for companies to determine their penetrability.

However we characterize them, information security, identity theft and so on represent major challenges today.

A prime example of consumer vulnerability came last year when federal authorities indicted three men on charges of hacking into computer systems at numerous Dave & Buster’s restaurants and stealing

credit card information. The federal government accused the men of stealing “Track 2” magnetic stripe data — which includes account numbers, expiration data and security codes — from customers’ credit cards, and then selling this information to others who used it to make fraudulent purchases.

This article provides a more detailed guide to reading your credit report as referenced in Privacy Means Profit.

A credit report is a history of how you or your company borrow and then pay off your credit, including delinquency and bankruptcy. There are currently three main credit bureaus in the United States—Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. If you own a home, have a credit card, lease a car, or apply for or use credit of any sort, this information is reported to one, two or all three of these credit bureaus. In addition, they collect information on how timely you pay your bills, how often you are tardy, how frequently your credit is checked by companies and any changes of address, employment, or personal information.

By monitoring these reports closely, you will know when someone else is using your credit rating to their benefit. If an identity thief opens a new credit card or takes out a loan using your Social Security number, you will see it on your report. The quicker you spot the problem, the less trouble it will cause. Monitoring your credit report is the single most effective monitoring tool available to keep minor identity theft from turning into full-scale identity fraud.

Nigerian scams happen everyday to thousands of victims in various ways: email, snail mail, fax, Facebook and for the first time in our experience, the “Contact Us” page on our website. This is significant because it shows the the technology of the Nigerian crime rings has advanced enough to foil the Captcha device on our website.

Nigerian scams (more accurately known as advanced-fee fraud) have been around for ages and were named because they originated in Nigeria. To create the scam, criminals generally claim that there is a large sum of money that can only be released to a relative of some deceased member of royalty.  Victims are asked to provide a bank account into which the money can be transferred and are promised a large percentage of the money for performing the service. In some cases, victims may also be asked to pay a fee or a series of fees for the release of the money.  Once the victim has provided account information, the criminals will often drain their bank accounts, and occasionally use that information to open new, fraudulent accounts.

If you have never seen one before I highly recommend you read this. They change frequently and recently have been taking more complex forms, but the intention is always the same: to steal your money in exchange for the prospect of wealth that never materializes.  After seeing how they try to lure you into helping them with a compelling story,  you will be able to spot them with ease and protect yourself form becoming a victim.

Fellowes Powershred

Workplace identity theft isn’t caused by paper documents because we have gone paperless, right? Rubbish. Paper rubbish, in fact.

You and I both know that we use as much paper as ever. We sign up for electronic statements and then print and file them, along with important emails, financial documents, etc. Paper documents are more plentiful than ever, and they pose a significant risk of workplace identity theft and data breach.

According to a recent study* conducted by the Alliance for Secure Business Information (ASBI):

80% of large organizations surveyed indicated that they had experienced one or more data breaches over the previous 12 months. 49% of those breaches involved the loss or theft of paper documents. The average breach recovery cost $6.75 Million!

People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.
—Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

People don’t change bad habits until they have a compelling reason. Too often that compelling reason is the result of a habit’s negative outcome; but the promise of positive rewards resulting from the establishment of good habits can be a strong motivator. In the workplace, aligning responsible information stewardship with personal and professional gain can set the stage for good privacy habits.

Here are 5 steps you can take towards perfecting your own Privacy Habits:

1. Tighten up online passwords. Create strong, alphanumeric passwords. Instead of your password being Sunflower make it $uNf(0w3R.  Don’t use common password reminders such as your dog’s name, street address, or mother’s maiden name. All of those would be easily uncovered by an identity thief.
2. Buy a Shredder – and use it. By shredding anything that has your name, address, birthday, social security number, or account numbers on it, you will be less likely to have your identity stolen through the trash. Make sure that the shredder you chose is kept in a convenient location – if you can’t get to it fast, you won’t use it!