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In Parts I – III we talked about how easy it is for your child’s identity to be kidnapped and who does it; now let’s get to the heart of…
Protecting Your Children
Acting now on behalf of your child will protect them from consequences common to child victims:
- Starting adulthood with a credit rating low enough to scare away the hungriest of loan sharks
- Being denied a first loan, credit card or apartment rental because of a crime committed 10-15 years earlier (the passage of time makes this crime very hard to clear up)
- Being denied access to college or a new job
- Having a warrant out for her arrest for crimes that she didn’t commit
In the same way that you can’t protect your children from every bruise and scrape, you can’t entirely remove the risk of identity theft. You can, however, prevent or soften the fall if it does happen. Take these steps first:
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: child identity monitoring, child identity theft, Identity Theft Prevention
If you’re thinking “this couldn’t happen to my child,” think again! Let’s look at
Who Does This?
The identity thief is not always a stranger. In many cases, it’s a relative with bad credit who takes advantage of a child’s pristine credit. Conveniently, these family members generally have access to the information necessary to maximize the fraud with little attention.
This seems absurd, but imagine a parent who is strapped for cash, has a bad credit score and needs to buy groceries. In this case, short-term thinking blinds the relative or friend to long-term consequences. In other instances, the child’s future is not taken into consideration at all.
Frankly, it doesn’t take much to get the crime underway; all a criminal needs is the child’s name and Social Security Number. These pieces of personal information are exposed in a variety of ways:
- When registering for daycare, schools and recreational sports
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: child identity theft, identity theft expert, Identity Theft Prevention
According to Cnet.com, security firm Sophos has highlighted yet another scam that’s zipping around Facebook in the form of a third-party application, this one spreading in the form of links claiming to be from friends that encourage members to install a Facebook “dislike button.”
Sophos wrote about the scam in a post on Monday, pointing out that a link to it tends to appear in wall posts that appear to be from the user’s friends (“I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!!”) but which are actually automated messages from friends who have already been duped. The scam’s purpose is to force users to complete a survey contained in the application, a bit of trickery that has already been known to be perpetuated through scam links like “Justin Bieber trying to flirt” and “Anaconda coughs up a hippo,” the two of which presumably would be enticing to rather different demographics of Facebook users.
Posted in Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: CNet, Dislike Button, Facebook, Fackbook, Identity Theft Prevention, John Sileo, Like Button, news, Scam, Social Networking Expert
The following is an excerpt from John’s latest book Privacy Means Profit. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit our website www.ThinkLikeASpy.com.
For businesses, shredding is low-hanging fruit (one of the easiest sources of data breach to eliminate). But businesses are so often focused on electronic forms of data breach that they fail to heed the following statistics highlighted in a recent Ponemon Institute study conducted for the Alliance for Secure Business Information:
- More than 50 percent of sensitive business data is still stored on paper documents.
- Forty-nine percent of data breaches reported in the survey were the result of paper documents.
- Sixty percent of businesses admitted that they didn’t provide the proper tools (e.g., shredders) to safely discard documents that were no longer needed.
- The average data breach recovery cost according to this survey was $6.3 million.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Document Shredders, Identity Theft Prevention, Privacy Means Profit, Shred, Shredding, Sileo, Workplace ID Theft
Privacy Means Profit (Wiley) available in bookstores today!
Here are The Top 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy It:
You love sharing bank account numbers, surfing habits and customer data with cyber thieves over unprotected wireless networks
You never tempt hackers and con artists by using Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Docs, or other cloud computing platforms to store or communicate private info, personally or professionally.
You bury your head in the sand, insisting that “insider theft” won’t affect your home or business.
You’ve already hardened your laptops and other mobile computing devices in 7 vital ways, eliminating a major source of both personal and corporate data theft.
You have a “thing” for identity theft recovery costs and would rather invest thousands in recovery than $25 in prevention.
If you want to defend yourself and your business against identity theft, data breach and corporate espionage, then buy a copy of Privacy Means Profit.
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Digital Reputation & Trust, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: identity theft expert, Identity Theft Prevention, Identity Theft Protection, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Privacy Means Profit, Think Like A Spy, Wiley, Wiley & Sons
John Sileo knows identity theft and data breach first hand – he became “America’s Leading Identity Theft Speaker and Expert” after losing his business and more than $300,000 to these costly crimes. He has provided these Identity Theft Resources to help you protect your organization from suffering from the losses that result from unprotected private information. Visit John’s Identity Theft Prevention Store to learn more.
Hire John to train your employees to prevent identity theft, data breach and corporate espionage
Safe data is profitable data, whether it’s a client’s credit card number, a patient’s medical file, an employee’s benefit plan or sensitive intellectual capital. By the time John finishes his hilarious closing story, your audience will be fully empowered to protect private information, at home and at work.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Data Breach, Data Breach Training, Fraud Training, Identity Theft Prevention, Identity Theft Resources, identity theft training, Information Security, seminars, Speaking, Speech, Speeches, training, workshops
CSIdentity Protector Tri-Bureau
Only 25% of identity theft can be detected by traditional credit report monitoring, which means that you need a more sophisticated service than the average offering (LifeLock). If you are time starved, convenience based or just simply want a comprehensive way to detect the inappropriate use of your data, you need to enlist an identity monitoring service. It’s similar to having someone monitor your home alarm system.
Here’s a bit of background. Traditional credit monitoring only detects a portion of identity theft. The remaining theft happens on non-credit loan activities (pay-day loans, etc), as part of public records (court cases, real estate transactions, government filings, etc.), over the internet (bought and sold on identity-for-sale sites), or in relation to medical or criminal records. It is important to monitor these forms of potential identity theft as well as your credit file. CSIdentity’s Protector Tri-Bureau product wins the award for Best-in-Class identity monitoring based on 7 criteria:
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Credit Monitoring, CSIdentity, CSidentity Protector, Equifax, Experian, ID Watchdog, identity monitoring, Identity Theft Monitoring Services, Identity Theft Prevention, Identity Theft Services, Identitytheft911, idradar, idradar.com, John Sileo, LifeLock, Product Reviews, TransUnion
People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.
—Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
People don’t change bad habits until they have a compelling reason. Too often that compelling reason is the result of a habit’s negative outcome; but the promise of positive rewards resulting from the establishment of good habits can be a strong motivator. In the workplace, aligning responsible information stewardship with personal and professional gain can set the stage for good privacy habits.
Here are 5 steps you can take towards perfecting your own Privacy Habits:
- Tighten up online passwords. Create strong, alphanumeric passwords. Instead of your password being Sunflower make it $uNf(0w3R. Don’t use common password reminders such as your dog’s name, street address, or mother’s maiden name. All of those would be easily uncovered by an identity thief.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: 5 steps, identity theft expert, Identity Theft Prevention, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Privacy Habits, Privacy Means Profit, Protection
SentrySafe Fire Safes
A majority of our most valuable identity documents (passports, birth and death certificates, wills, trusts, deeds, brokerage information, passwords, health records, etc.) are exposed to identity theft (and natural disasters, such as fire and floods) as they sit in unlocked filing cabinets, banking boxes in the basement, office drawers or out in the open, on our desks. I spend an entire chapter in Privacy Means Profit talking about which documents to lock up, which to destroy and which to stop at the source. To complicate matters, the problem of data theft goes beyond paper documents to digital media. More than ever we need to be concerned with the physical protection of hard drives, cell phones, thumb drives, CDs and DVDs with sensitive personal or business data on them.
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention, Product Reviews by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Data Breach, Document Protection, Document Shredding, Document Storage, Fire Safe, Fire Safes, identity theft expert, Identity Theft Prevention, John Sileo
