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RAF MILDENHALL, England -- Identity theft is when someone acquires another’s personal identifying information, such as social security or credit card numbers, without the owner’s permission and uses them to commit fraud or other crimes.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, an estimated nine million Americans have their identities stolen each year. Identity thieves can use someone’s personal information in many criminal ways, including renting an apartment, opening a new line of credit or establishing a telephone account.
Identity thieves use many ways to acquire personal information such as dumpster-diving, skimming, phishing, changing a victim’s address (to redirect their mail), old-fashioned stealing and pretexting (the act of using false pretenses to receive customer information from a customer or a financial institution). Once an identity thief has someone’s personal information, they can either sell it to others or use it themselves to commit many different forms of fraud.
The Air Force suggests that all data be destroyed by any reasonable method that prevents loss, theft, or compromise during and after destruction such as pulping, macerating, tearing, burning, shredding or otherwise completely destroying the media so that Personally Identifiable Information is unreadable and is beyond reconstruction.
According to Air Force Instruction 33-332, Air Force Privacy Act and Civil Liberties Program, PII is information which can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity to a specific individual such as name, social security number, date, place of birth, mother's maiden name, biometric records and other personal information linked to an individual.
“It is important that all personal information is destroyed because social security numbers are not the only thing that criminals need to steal an identity,” said Staff Sgt. Joshua Christenbury, 100th Communications Squadron knowledge operations NCO in-charge.
The FTC suggests monitoring accounts and bank statements each month and checking credit reports on a regular basis with one of the consumer reporting companies Equifax, TransUnion or Experian. By checking credit reports regularly, victims may be able to limit damages caused by identity theft.
The FTC has four steps that you should take immediately:
Report the fraud to one of the consumer reporting companies Equifax, TransUnion or Experian.
Close any account that is known or believed to have been opened or used fraudulently
File a police report with local authorities
File a complaint with the FTC
More information about identity theft and how to fight it can be found on the U.S. Secret Service website www.secretservice.gov
| Date Taken: | 05.07.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 05.11.2012 09:24 |
| Story ID: | 88301 |
| Location: | ABE, GB |
| Web Views: | 34 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Identity theft: Don’t let it happen to you, by SrA Ethan Morgan, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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