When you speak or hear of identity thieves, do you really know who these identity thieves are?  Are they one person or a gang?  Identity thieves fall into different categories and each one has specific signs or characteristics and you have to guard against them differently.

Identity Theft Rings

These identity theft rings may pull together several individuals to collect very useable information.  Some of these individuals maybe called card skimmers, dumpster divers or mailbox snoopers.  Together they work to get information to a couple of individuals.  The people who are targeted by identity theft rings become victims very quickly.  The reason for this is that is already a market for this type of information.

The identity theft rings can use this information that they collect to commit financial theft, criminal identity theft, and social security fraud.  There is a much greater chance on the latter two happening than the first.  This is largely because of illegal immigrants who need this information to stay in the United States and obtain a job.  It does not matter to them if it is legal or not.  Victims who have data breaches that involved in insurance and medical have the highest risk of medical
identity theft.

Organized Identity Theft

This type of identity theft is usually about a data breach, which compromises tens or hundreds of thousands of records.  You only need to be concerned if that organization or company has your information.  These identity thieves are planning on wholesaling the information that they have collected.  Because so many records were stolen there is not time limit on when a person will become a victim of  or if they even will.

For a company that has had a data breach, their standard response is to offer credit monitoring for a year to its victims, usually picking up the tab for this.  Although they may offer monitoring for a year, it is a completely inadequate solution.

Please note that not every data breach is the work of organized identity thieves.

You cannot prevent organized identity theft simply because you cannot control your information.  There are identity theft protection laws, such as FACTA and HIPAA business are slow to comply with the laws.  There are so many factors, in regards to your identity, which are out of your control about these laws; it is good to have an identity detection program in place.

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