- Shakespeare, Othello, act iii. Sc. 3.

I often relate these posts to students. This is for a number of reasons. For starters, this group is a little more naive when it comes to credit theft. They use their debit or credit cards everywhere and with little to no responsibility. Being a member of this group not too long ago, I feel a deep sense of responsibility when it comes to educating these college students. You and the $29.47 in your bank account are more of a target than you realize.

According to Javelin Strategy and Research’s 2010 Identity Fraud Survey Report, more than 11 million people became victims of identity theft in 2009. Young adults aged 18-24 took an average of 132 days to detect identity theft. Subsequently, the average cost ($1,156) was roughly five times more than the amount lost by other age groups.

Let’s face it, as a college kid you have more important things to worry about: There’s that girl in R-216, getting to work and class on time, and most importantly developing a booming social life. It can be a tremendously difficult lesson to learn at an age where it shouldn’t even be a risk. Sorry guys. You are an easy target.

“Identity thieves don’t care if you’re a struggling student and don’t have a penny to your name; all they want is to exploit your clean credit record,” said Matthew Fehling, BBB President/CEO. “Young adults who establish good habits for monitoring and detecting fraud are creating a healthy financial road for the rest of their lives.”

This portion of the post will hopefully ensure a more college kids get to spend their nights at parties and not on the phone with credit card companies and bank hotlines. Here are the major guidelines for college students:

Have sensitive mail sent to a PO Box or a parent’s home. A lot of times these student mail boxes aren’t secure. The sorting of the mail is often a paid student position as well.

Get a lock box. It will be your treasure chest.

Use your lock box.

Don’t put any revealing info on your social media pages. Maybe your email, but that’s it.

Don’t give your plastic to anyone. Even friends can be tempted or act irresponsibly with your cards.

Check bank statements and credit reports regularly. It takes very little time and will prevent you from becoming an unaware victim.

Report weird charges and possible fraud.

Protect your computer. Spyware, antivirus, and passwords people. They are not that expensive. This also means watch where you surf the web and where you online shop.

Watch the free gift with sign-up credit card offer stands. A lot of college students do this: they sign up for a card for the free t-shirt and then never activate it or use it. This practice welcomes fraud.

Everyone and their dog will ask for your SSN while you are at school. There are other things that are just as good and identifiable. Authority or not, sometimes you don’t need to give it out. Guard that XXX-XX-XXXX with your life.

Related Sites:

ED.gov, Identity Theft: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/misused/idtheft.html

Fraud Victim Handbook: http://www.fraudaid.com/How-To-Deal-With-Having-Been-Conned/index.htm

The device is called a skimmer. The credit card skimmer takes seconds to us, and what’s worse, you almost never know it happened. The handheld models are responsible for this type of identity theft. The best way to avoid becoming a victim is to use cash when these transactions arise. Do not let your card out of your sight and be able to identify a skimmer.

Authorities are not taking this lightly, but you should also abandon the routines that making yourself vulnerable. Last month an employee of the Cheesecake Factory was arrested and pled guilty to the charge of committing bank fraud and for her involvement in a card-skimming scheme in Washington state. Nicole Ward now faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

Handheld skimmers are not the only threat. ATMs and Red Box units have been recently rigged with scanners/skimmers which are placed on the machine in hopes of getting accidental use. In some cases, they are just placed on or by the real card reader. A person swipes their card, nothing happens, and so they try the other slot. The damage has already been done. Other times they are placed directly over the real slot, so it both steals your info and still allows your card to be read by the real ATM on the backside.

It’s not an urban legend. It really happens. Some may even use wireless hacks. Snopes.com breaks the scam down here.

Best way to not become a victim? Be aware of your surroundings at the ATM. Don’t use it if it looks different that prior visits. Go inside at the bank and use banks where the teller scanner is on your side of the counter. Finally, use cash when possible and never let your card out of your sight. Also, keep your savings and debit accounts separate. Transfer funds on an as-needed  basis.

First and foremost, adopt a policy of the FBI towards your information. DO NOT just give the information out because it is asked for by an “authoritative” source. Adopt a “need to know” approach. The more comfortable you get with giving out things like your mother’s maiden name or your social, the greater the risk becomes. Develop a routine of offering other less personal information like phone numbers or conformation emails. As a general rule, never give out your data for the claiming of a credit card, prize, or anything of value over the phone. Ask instead for a written application form. Look at the resources for on the BBB website.

I know its summer and many of us are traveling. So I feel this is extra pertinent to say this: If your neighborhood does not have a lockable mailbox unit, get you mail forwarded and held at a local post office. I suppose you could also have a trusted neighbor collect it for you. Also, if you need to pass financial information over the phone, don’t do it from an open telephone booth.

You can find more information on how to keep your personal data safe this summer by visiting the Department of Justice website.

I know this isn’t really an identity theft relevant topic, but I felt it pertinent all the same. The goal of ProtectIdentity.com is to keep you and your family safe. In that aspect, I think it’s not a digression.

“The FBI uses national security letters to find not just who the target of an investigation e-mailed, but also who those people e-mailed and who e-mailed them.” This is the statement that Gregory Nojeim, the director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology made in reference to the governments new stance on web surfing. It’s a slippery slope though. Yes, it is true that this policy will help law enforcement track and catch those engaging in illegal activity, but the massive invasion of privacy cannot be easily overlooked. Criticism abounds.

The current process isn’t without flaws anyway. Obtaining a security letter to gather information has not been an infallible system. The bureau has allegedly engaged in a widespread and serious misuse of its authority in the issuing of these letters. From 2003 to 2006, the bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests. It has also been concluded by the Justice Department’s inspector in 2007, that data from Americans and foreigners has been collected illegally.

This is not something to put out of sight and out of mind. It’s a huge expansion of the FBI’s authority. They are planning on burying it in the intelligence authorization bill. Why? Is it really just intended to bury it from scrutiny? The proposed amendment is going to add the category “electronic communications transactional records” to a section of the law which already lists only those items cited in the Justice legal opinion. Why? It’s because those four words are already included in another section of the law.

It should be met that this proposed amendment has Congress on guard with good reason. The Obama administration’s action here could just clarify a statue or end up allowing the FBI to request sensitive information without federal judges and courts being allowed to scrutinize it.

The alleged scammers were using fake company names similar to real names and information taken from identity theft victims in the United States. They opened over 100 “merchant” accounts with companies who process charges to consumers’ credit and debit card accounts. The FTC believes these defendants actually ran credit checks on their prospective victims prior to scamming; to be sure they were creditworthy.

The majority of consumers didn’t notice the charges on their bills or didn’t seek reimbursement because of the size of the amounts, which ranged from 20 cents to $10. People that called the phone numbers appearing on their statements found them disconnected or heard recorded messages instructing them to leave a message, but no calls were returned.

Check you statements every month. If you or your wife can’t identify the charge, CALL THE BANK OR CREDIT CARD COMPANY! Stay on top of your credit too.

The World Wide Web (Do people even call it that anymore?) can be a dangerous place for your kids. Crazy To Catch a Predator stuff goes on everyday.  We don’t know who is on the other end of the connection talking to our kids. It makes my skin crawl to even think about it. On the other hand, after a long day of work the last thing I want to do is fight with my children about how and what they get to access on the net.

I’m also not going to do a reverse email lookup and a sex offender search for every little friend my kid makes online (Although I have done it before and it was in fact a 35 year-old man with a charge for “Fail & Refuse to Furnish Proof of Age and ID” and “Sexual misconduct with a minor in the first degree”. So the threat is real people. You best believe that my kids facebook accounts and yahoo messenger accounts were cancelled after that.

I can’t wrap them in bubble wrap before I sent them to school or walk them to the bus until they are 18. So I sat them down and talked to them like the competent little minds they are. Not sharing last names, addresses, birth days, schools attended, parents credit card numbers, etc. After doing so I went in search of alternatives.  I can’t just kick them off the computer. I found my answer in Togetherville.com.

It’s a safe online neighborhood for kids under 10. Here they can play games, create art and interact with friends and family under your supervision. It’s gotten some recognition from The Journal and The Times. Mashable.com even did an article about it.

I didn’t mean to put you off from performing one of those searches either. If you suspect your child (any age) is chatting with a serious creeper (Some younger girls [boys too i guess] find the attention of a much older male appealing. And won’t be telling you about it any time soon). Monitor their behavior and launch one of those searches after any signs arise.

PeopleSearching.com is a comparison site which will let you see what others user think of these services.

The only concern that arises then is that its viral distribution may suffer because it is not perceived as “hip, cool, or grown-up”.  Still if it does catch on, it could be a huge step toward raising awareness and will hopefully dissuade predators from even accessing the site.  The app can be found here.

Facebook has been resisting the launch of the ‘panic button’ for years. But the pressure mounted on the site after the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall by a 33-year-old convicted sex offender, who was posing as a teenage boy, who she allegedly met on the site. Presently, it is functioning in the UK. There has been no mention of bringing it to the states yet.

Parent’s best bet is to still monitor their children’s behavior and correspondence. Have a talk with your child about the dangers of internet and let them know you are not opposed to making sure they are safe from the sidelines. Parental controls can only do so much. You need to let your kid know you are onboard with whatever they are doing, but they should see who they are really talking to.

A reverse email search will do just that. If you do so, and find the person’s name, a sex offender search may be the next step.

Whatever motivated Facebook to launch this campaign, I’m elated that such steps have been made.

Just to get things going here, if you are just throwing your old machines out when you are done with them, you may be handing the public your personal info. If you are moving all your personal files to the trash and hitting “empty” you may still be doing so as well. When you go and delete a file, only the link between the computer’s index and the deleted file goes away. This lets you computer know that that space can be overwritten.  But all the bits and pieces of the deleted file will remain on the machine until they are actually overwritten. The deleted files can still be retrieved with a data recovery program ($50) . To remove data from your hard drive permanently, it needs to be wiped clean.

If you are going to throw out or sell and old computer of yours, the smartest thing to do is “write zeros to the hard drive” this means the entire machine is blank. Not even an operating system will remain.

Of course if you are in fact throwing it out, you could always remove the physical hard drive itself and play home run derby with it for half an hour. You could alway look into recycling or donating after the computer has been wiped clean.

Of course there are also some out there would would prefer to just  hack sites.

Here’s a few other tips when it comes to browsing the net safely and, more importantly, in an knowledgeable state:

What to look for (and ultimately avoid)

• Broken graphics, grammatical errors, misspellings, and poorly written sentences.
• A sense of urgency or immediate action required.
• Requests for personal or confidential information.
• Links that go to an unknown Web site or a Web site that looks similar but the site address may be slightly altered. Recheck any typed web addresses or URLs to ensure it was entered correctly before providing personal information on a site.
• Be suspicious of an information-collecting Web page that is not linked to a known home page for the company, or the home page has an “under construction” message on it.
• Look for the presence of an “@” symbol anywhere in the page URL. This is usually indicative of a fraudulent Web site.

As I said, phishing has taken on a new form. It was of course, only a matter of time. Phishing has now evolved into Smishing. The simplest explanation is taking it’s mobile phishing. Phishing for the cellular phone users as it were. The concept is the same, only now they are using texting. This is where the name comes from. SMS is the technical name for text messages. So the name is then derived from “SMs phISHING”.

What these criminals do is text you something like these:

• “We’re confirming you’ve signed up for our dating service. You will be charged $2/day unless you cancel your order on this URL: www.?????.com.”
• “(Name of popular online bank) is confirming that you have purchase a $1500 computer from (name of popular computer company). Visit www.?????.com if you did not make this online purchase”
• “(Name of a financial institution): Your account has been suspended. Call ###.###.#### immediately to reactivate”

After which, you are always prompted to enter in your info at a ‘credible’ website and then get to watch your credit/finances go to hell in a hurry.