Identity Theft Prevention Tips

If you spend any amount of time doing email, you have probably seen some of these emails. You get a very official looking email that is supposedly from your bank or one of your credit card companies. The email even sports the logo of the company to make it look even more authentic. As good keepers of your account information, they inform you that your account may have been compromised, so they provide a link and ask you to click on it to verify certain information about yourself.

Literally within minutes of the unsuspecting email recipient clicking on that link to verify their personal information, their accounts are wiped out and they are now a victim of identity theft.

Do not fall victim to this. Identity theft criminals routinely send this type of email, millions of them, to consumers. Since they send millions of these emails, chances are unfortunately high that many of the consumers will fall for it and click the link to provide their personal information. Yes, the email looks official, even containing the logo of the bank or credit card company, and after clicking the link, they are taken to a web page that looks very much like that web page of the bank or credit card issuer.

But anyone can create such an official looking web page and put a logo in an email, including most 12 year old kids these days. That web page does NOT belong to your bank or credit card issuer, but instead sends your personal information, perhaps including your PIN numbers, directly to the thieves.

Please understand that your bank or credit card issuer will NEVER ask you to verify any personal information online. If they ever do that and it's for real, close that account immediately and do business elsewhere, since that company has just demonstrated that they have no regard for the protection of your personal information.

This type of activity is commonly known as "phishing", being modeled after the thought of thieves "fishing" and casting their nets over the Internet to find out how many unsuspecting people they can capture.