KNOWLEDGE CENTER
- History of Identity Theft
- A Look at identity Theft Statistics
- Credit Monitoring: Protecting Yourself Against Identity Theft
- Understanding Identity Theft: How an ID Thief Gets Your Information
- Phishing Scams: Understanding and Protecting yourself
- Identity Theft and Your Rights
- The Internet and Identity Theft: What You Must Need to Know
- Preventing Identity Theft: Protecting Personal Information
- Common Identity Theft Scams
- Suspicious Signs and Signals
- A Look at Credit Card Fraud: Identity Theft In the 21st Century
IDENTITY THEFT LINKS
A Look at Credit Card Fraud
Identity Theft In the 21st Century
Credit card fraud is one of the most common types of identity theft in this day and age. With this in mind, if you want to take the strongest steps possible to protect yourself against identity theft, you need to understand what is involved with credit card fraud and how you can go about preventing it. Through this article, you are provided some basic and essential information about identity theft and credit card fraud.
One way in which credit card fraud can occur is through the use of the telephone. The ID thief calls you on the phone indicating that he or she is marketing a product or perhaps even raising money for a charity or some good cause. There are also credit card fraud schemes in which the caller identifies his or her self as being associated with a governmental agency of some sort or that you are the winner of a lottery. Through this scheme, the ID thief manipulates the person on the other end of the phone into volunteering credit card information.
Another very, very common scheme when it comes to credit card fraud involves what is known as phishing. In this regard, you might receive an email advertising a product for sale on the Net. You click onto a link within the email and end up at a website that looks completely legitimate. However, what the website is a sham and when you input your credit card and related information you actually are providing these materials to an identity thief.
In this day and age, the low tech approach to credit card fraud is still being used. This involves stealing your mail in the hopes that the bad operator will be able to glean credit card and other personal and financial information from your mail. Indeed, it is even possible for actual credit cards that are being mailed to consumers to be misappropriated in this manner.
Another low tech option that criminals use to engage in credit card fraud is to dumpster dive is to go through your trash. By doing so, these individuals hope to be able to find bank and credit card statements and other information which will allow them to commit identity theft.
The bottom line is that in this day and age you must be very careful about when and where you provide your credit card information. Moreover, in order to avoid becoming the victim of credit card fraud, you need to take the time to shred important documents before you throw them away and you must make sure that your mailbox is secure completely.
