Internet Identity Theft

Did you know that a lot of your information is actually available on the Internet? Public documents are even available online that contain identifying information that might harm you in the hands of a thief.

The Internet is a wonderful marketplace for buying everything under the sun…including your personal information. Believe it or not, there are chat rooms where the pirates of personal information go to sell or trade credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information.

On a May, 2005 episode of the Paula Zahn show on CNN, Zahn described identity theft as a multi-billion dollar epidemic. She interviewed a woman who’d been “living identity theft for seven years now.”

How angry and frustrated would you be if you had to spend the next 7 years cleaning up your credit, clearing your name, and paying off debts some thief ran up? How would such a major loss of your time impact your job performance and life?

Zahn showed a videotape of a chat room, probably in Europe, in which thieves were quite shamelessly and brazenly swapping credit card numbers and checking account numbers for cash and for the latest versions of hacker tools. In fact, when an investigator entered the chat room, he received an instant message offering credit cards with CVV-2 (the three or four numbers above the card number), full info, and PayPal account numbers—all for sale or trade.

Guess how many other people were in that chat room? 600! 600 thieves, all swapping personal information. You have to wonder how many other chat rooms there are for those thieves. Something else to consider: if all of that is happening in public areas online, what is going on in private online areas?

You will learn more about Internet and computer ID theft in the Preventing Online/Computer Identity Theft section.