Commission Blueprint

ID theft varies, but a large percentage of personal information is stolen by very simple, but very effective methods. These are designed to trick people into revealing personal information voluntarily, and there are three main ways thieves contact their potential victims to do this:

1. Telephone Canvassing – thieves will phone individuals or businesses and try and extract personal information by methods including pretending to have a special offer or prize (once in a lifetime holiday or cash), which requires personal information such as your name, address and even bank account number to process, or pretending to be from a legitimate company (a bank or credit card service) and asking you to confirm your account details over the phone. Have you considered reading the Trusted ID review?

2. Postal canvassing – thieves will also use the postal system to try and extract personal information by sending out special offers or prize opportunities, or pretending to be a legitimate company, all of which try and trick you into replying with personal information.

3. Email – this is one of the most successful methods for thieves, as they can reach millions of people at very little cost via email, and as with the above methods they will try and trick you into replying to them with personal information. Also emails can contain links to phony websites, or attachments that contain malicious programs. Therefore, you probably want to consider identity protection, which will protect you from these types of situations.

It is important that you verify all requests for personal information, and remember that legitimate financial services such as banks, credit card companies would never phone or send a letter or email you requesting sensitive account details.