Identity Theft Online

How Can Identity Theft Be Done So Easily?

In the most basic of terms, identity theft is the name given to the practice whereby personal information and personal details of one person, is used by an unauthorized third party to obtain something fraudulently.

In most instances, it is used to create bank accounts and obtain credit cards in order to defraud a company in the acquisition of goods. It is not just limited to these areas, with many crimes being reported where homes and cars and other major assets have been bought, and then sold to cover the trail.

But many people question the ease at which these criminals can commit such crimes. However, it is amazingly simple, often requiring nothing more than a few address details, a social security number, and financial accounts information taken from a discarded bank statement.

There are many methods that these thieves can obtain this information too, and whilst some of them can be quite cunning and deceptive, others are anything but.

The simplest way is known as “dumpster diving”. As

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Tags: Identity Theft, Theft

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SWATting, Using Technology To Hurt

Caller ID spoofing technologies are used to send law officers on bogus calls along with, social engineering, and phone phreaking techniques combined. 911 systems (including telephony and human operators) have been tricked by calls placed from cities hundreds of miles away.

Caller ID spoofing is the practice of causing the telephone network to display a number on the recipient’s caller ID display which is not that of the actual originating caller. Similar to e-mail spoofing which can make it appear that a message came from any e-mail address the sender chooses, caller ID spoofing can make a call appear to have come from any phone number. Most people trust caller ID and are unaware of caller ID spoofing. This is obviously a flawed system ripe for fraud.

MSNBC reports Doug Bates and his wife, Stacey, were in bed around 10 p.m., their 2-year-old daughters asleep in a nearby room. Suddenly they were shaken awake by the wail of police sirens and the rumble of a helicopter above their suburban Southern California home. A

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Hackers Indicted for Jacking Comcast

It has not been disclosed how the email was compromised, but there are many ways it could be. Wired/CNN reports as described in the indictment, the hackers got control of the domain with two phone calls, and an e-mail was sent to the company’s domain registrar, Network Solutions, from a hacked Comcast e-mail account.

That gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for Comcast’s 200 domains, according to the indictment.

The hackers ages 19 and 20 at the time known as Defiant and EBK from a group calling themselves Kryogeniks scrawled “KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.” Across Comcasts homepage after they were rebuffed by Comcasts tech admin. Where they screwed up during their stunt was when they changed the contact information for the Comcast.net domain to Defiant’s e-mail address. Brilliant hackers yet not so smart.

One way of compromising email accounts is via simply going to the “forgot password” section of your email provider’s website and respond to a preselected personal question that you answered when signing up for the account. With a little r

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Tags: Hackers, Hackers Indicted

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A Quick Look At Identity Theft

Most Americans strive at keeping their credit score acceptable to merchants, making many sacrifices to pay bills on time. It is the American dream to own that dream car and home with all the necessities to make their lives comfortable. In today’s credit driven world, the only way to accomplish this dream is to have an excellent credit rating. Identity theft can take that hard earned credit rating and destroy it in a matter of days, which is why identity protection should be a concern of everyone.

Identity theft can happen many ways, all very stressful and destructive to the person whose identity has been stolen. A couple of the most popular ways identity theft has occurs online, but that’s not the only way to retrieve someone’s personal information. Online theft may be the easiest way to steal an identity which makes an identity theft protection plan an important defense mechanism everyone should consider.

Computer software that was developed to watch what other people are doing on their computer allows the identity theft to acquire personal information, such as credit card number and social security number. Anoth

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Money Mules Facilitate Identity Theft and Fraud

An RSA study revealed laptops, iPods, iPhones, Nokia smartphones, digital cameras, Sony PlayStation 3 devices, and DJ equipment were among the items shipped to addresses in Russia and Belarus. RSA estimates that more than $36,000 worth of merchandise was cashed out every month before one scam ended earlier this year.

These scams generally have a virtual store front posing as a shipping company, giving the ruse a legitimate appearance. The efficiency of money mule operations has increased due to the amount of money being generated from data breaches and scams.

There have been dozens of significant data breaches over the past few years, in which millions of credit card numbers have been compromised. Once the data is in the hands of a criminal, they scheme to turn it into cash.

Credit card numbers are often bought and sold by “carders” who sell thousands of cards numbers for pennies each. In many cases when a PIN is present the criminal hacker will use the card number as a debit card at any ATM.

But when turning the data into cash isn’t so easy, they will burn the data to a white card and make in store purchases using mules. That

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