What Is Online Identity Theft?The massive growth of the internet is making online identity theft and fraud into a massive industry. Yes! That is right. We used the word "industry". The scale of methods of online fraud and theft lead us to the conclusion that these crimes are being committed on a near industrial scale. There are a number of methods that the fraudsters use and a number of types of crimes. Therefore, over the next few pages we will be explaining some of these methods and how they might impact you. More importantly, we will also look at some of the things that YOU need to do to protect yourself and your privacy online. One of the main issues that we all face relates to the sheer scale of personal information that is available online about each of us if you know where to look. Much of this information is even free of cost! Keeping this information private is a huge battle. Password security is difficult to maintain. Updating security software as often as required is a chore. All of these things give an advantage to the fraudster and make online identity theft a reality for more and more people. As you will read on the pages of this section and website and on many of the pages we link to, there are a number of locations online - forums and private chat rooms - that enable criminals to network and trade with each other. By doing this, they can create organisations that come together for a short period of time from all around the world to perform specific tasks. The phrase "underground economy" has never been so true. Such networks and loose short term affiliations are, of course, very hard to catch and prosecute by law enforcement. This puts the criminals at a real advantage meaning that we are left to our own devices to perform the majority of the protection that we need when using the internet. Go to the next page to find out how people put their identity at risk when they use
MySpace
and
Facebook
- click here to read our 2011 updates about
Facebook identity theft
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