Duration : 0:0:34

Technorati Tags: citibank, Identity, Louise, Theft, Thelma

Nellie holds all copyrights – I’m just helping her and Vanguard expose this great talent.

Duration : 0:3:29

Technorati Tags: Dark, Identity, Indie, Knight, McKay, Nellie, Obligatory, Theft, Villagers

Contact the police in that state, there are things you can do over the phone. But it’s really a tough situation, because the police really don’t put a high priority on investigating such things

Your best bet is to deal with the bank/credit card company that was used. Put the pressure on them by inquiring how someone was able to get access to your account information so easily and let them know that you just might not deal with them anymore if they aren’t proactive about researching it. They can check ATM video footage, they can pinpoint when a new card might have been sent out – and where it was sent. All valuable clues.

You’ll also want to alert the credit bureaus and have them put an alert on your account. This will block someone from opening new credit on your account without scrutinous verification.

The local prosecutor could bring criminal charges against your friend. This could mean fines, jail time, probation, etc.

The person(s) damaged by fraud could file a civil lawsuit against your friend to recover monetary damages. The total would be the amount of the fraud, court costs, attorneys fees, interest, etc.

What is your friend doing now to avoid bad judgments?

When you mark e-mail as phishing Hotmail (abuse?) team reviews it and changes the rules on the server to prevent future postings of the same content from getting into people’s Inboxes.

But first, this is a manual operation, a real person need to evaluate the content of the e-mail, so it takes time. Second, spammers use different tactics to go around server rules by varying their e-mails day to day, so server does not recognize them as previously blocked content.

It is still a good practice to mark Junk and Phishing e-mails as such to help mail server team to identify and block malicious content as soon as possible.

Duration : 0:2:18

Technorati Tags: Child, Identity, Internet, Pharming, Phishing, safety, scams, security, Theft

Duration : 0:2:35

Technorati Tags: Identity, Theft

Why has identity theft become so widespread today?

Have you or has anyone you love become the victim of identity theft?

Here are a few websites with a lot more information on identity theft and the prevention of it:

http://www.yourcreditadvisor.com/blog/2006/10/the_ultimate_gu.html

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/

http://www.aarp.org/learntech/personal_finance/identity_theft_intro.html

There are many more, but these should offer quite a start.

On short, what you can do is be very careful with what kind of information you’re giving away and to whom (especially the social security number and credit card information, but full name – phone number – address just as well).

Why it is so widespread – well, for one thing because a lot of places are asking for the social even if they don’t really need it (you shouldn’t have to give your social over the phone when you’re making a doctor’s appointment; yes, it should be on your file probably, but that should be taken care when you’re actually going to the doctor, not over the phone). On the other hand, since all financial services are now mostly online, a lot more people receive phishing (looking as if they were coming from your bank, when in fact they’re not) e-mails and once they follow the links in there, whoever sent those fake emails now have your account id and password. Or people don’t have a good firewall and a good antivirus set up, so that it’s easy for even an unexperienced hacker to take hold of some kind of personal information. From here to identity theft it’s only a very small step.

As for the last question: no, and I hope it’ll never happen.

Alex.