Identity Theft Check

There is thousands of honest ecommerce website around on the internet, all trying to sell us products and services of all kinds. But with all these honest sites there are quite a few dishonest sites too. So how can you tell between the honest and dishonest sites?
Security: always check the URL of the page to see if its https secured before entering in any credit card information, this can also be checked by looking for the “padlock” image in the bottom information bar of the browser.
E-mails: even though this is not a strict rule, never enter your credit card information into a site that you got to from an e-mail link that you haven’t signed up to. This is not always the case as a site may have sent you an affiliate link that is perfectly legitimate.
Cloned sites: these are a little more difficult to distinguish from, as the sites usually are an exact copy of a legitimate site just for the sole purpose of steeling your credit card and banking information. Although in most cases i have come across there are a few slight differences that you can look at to tell them apart. The URL is one of the most common, in most cases this will differ from the actual URL of the original site. Another way to tell is poor design work, this is where the site has been cloned from the original and then edited without really knowing what they were doing as the end result is a poor copy with things missing or images stretched out of shape.
Also remember when entering in card information into a site, the site in question should never ask you to provide banking passwords, memorable words, pass codes or pin numbers ECT so never give them out. Install antivirus and anti-spyware software to prevent sites installing backdoor key-loggers, and Trojans. And always remember if the site doesn’t look legitimate then don’t buy or provide personal information to it.

With the credit crunch still with us and money being tight, identity theft is on the increase; however there are a few things to keep in mind to help prevent your identity being stolen.
- Bank statements and general utility bills:
These are a identity thief’s dream as they contain pretty much all the information such as your bank number, sort code, address and even your national insurance number , which can all be used to apply for a credit card in your name.

- Cash Machines:
Recently there have been allot of cases of bank card cloning due to some kind of device being attached to the ATM machine that will clone your card and pin number. In most cases these can be spotted pretty Easley as there will be a large card aperture or something unusual about the card slot. In some cases reported, the ATM machine front face has been completely replaced with a false one, and only found to be false when the entire ATM front fell off.

- Mobile Phones:
As technology gets more and more advanced, we tent to place allot of our personal identifiable information into our mobile phones which an identity thief would love to get their hands on. It’s surprising how many people i have spoken too do not apply a password to their phone to make it more secure, and then one day you will probably leave it on the bus or it will fall out of your pocket and if it’s a good quality phone, the chances are you will never see it again. But as technology moves on further, to the point where we are paying for things using our mobile, it starts to make you think about who may want to steel it or where we leave it. There have already been trial’s to test the possibility of mobiles being used as payment devices, such as Barclays bank had a trial on the London underground last year, where you could use the phone to pay for travel across London, which will completely deplete the need for the currently used Oyster card.

Ever since I was in school, kids have been going off at dinner to the shops trying to get cigs to smoke on breaks etc.     Shop owners aren’t exactly daft when a kid in a school uniform walks in to the shop asking for “a pack of 10 Sovereign please”, so they have been reverting to getting fake ID just for that  unadictive smoke at dinner because they think it makes them look cool.     The reason I may be a bit aggreshive is because I was one of those kids, and I wish I never started smoking, nevermind because of the reason.

the new “gadget” in the smoking arena are the new ecigarettes, which you can get refills for AND smoke inside, you can go in the pub for a pint and have a cig at the same with no bother at all, the problem used to be the fact that they looked so female and I wouldn’t be caught dead having one, but now they have addressed this and have brought out the manly version which to be honest I am thinking of getting.  With these you do not get any of the chemicals which are in normal cigs i.e. tar etc, it is a cartridge of liquid nicotine which entered your mouth as vapour.

This is definitley something that will curb the identity theft which goes on for cigs etc, as anyone under 18 wouldn’t be allowed to buy one.

There are many different methods used by fraudsters to acquire personal information about you. Quite often they’ll play on human weaknesses and who doesn’t have a weakness for bargains?

Discount vouchers are a great way of getting cheaper products and services, but be wary as to where they come from. Many discount vouchers come free with magazines or are handed out at events. Discount codes are often available on websites and these can be entered at the checkout point when buying online.

However, you may find discount codes being sent to your inbox. This is okay if the sender is authentic, but on some occasions, they may not be. If you are offered discount vouchers only after registering or handing over personal information, this is a good chance that this is an attempt to illegally gather information about you.

There are occasions when a genuine organisation might require or ask for your details. If you have gone directly to the company’s homepage and found the discount vouchers from there, you can safely assume that there are no problems. However, if you have clicked a link in an email, there is every chance that you aren’t on the company’s real website, in which case you should avoid entering any personal details whatsoever.

The more our lives become enhanced by technology, the easier they become, the more susceptible to identity theft we are. It’s a sad fact that the majority of people in the UK will at some point become victims of ID theft, even if they never even realise it. It may be something large scale such as having money taken from your bank account, or things like unsecured loans or credit cards applied for in your name. It happens on a daily basis, and unless you take steps to minimise the risks of IF theft you’ll become a victim, and not even know it.

To minimise the chances of becoming a victim you need to take the following advice:

If you have multiple credit cards, as many of us do, keep a list of the cards you have, together with contact details for the banks that supplied them, so that should you lose them you can cancel them quickly. When you’re out, don’t carry all of your cards with you at once. Just take one or two with you, because if you lose your wallet or purse you don’t want to lose all of them at once.

You should also get a credit report every year to see what loans and cards have been applied for in your name.

Critics of the British identity card scheme suggest that they will compromise our civil liberties in the UK, that they will be too expensive and that they will do little to counter problems like terrorism (mentioned in a previous article).

There are also concerns that ID cards will cause tension within ‘ethnic minorities’, particularly groups that have been affected most by police stop and searches. Some people have even suggested that ID cards would force illegal immigrants to avoid contact with police and hospitals.

The government has tried to assure people that whereas the government does hold information about citizens, such as medical records and driving licence information, so do many private companies from supermarkets to insurance firms.

But the government emphasises that neither they nor the public at large have a system that proves who people really are without a wide margin for abuse and fraud.

Signatures and photo IDs are no longer considered enough in a world of hi-tech and often uncontrollable dispersion of personal information. The British ID cards, however, are intended to link biometric Person-Identifying Information, like iris patterns and fingerprints with the ID document itself.

It is hoped that this would make it nearly impossible for most criminals to impersonate other people for fraudulent ends, or to create entirely fake identities for similar purposes…

Here follow a list of Frequently Asked Questions concerning the proposed British ID cards:

Was the Parliamentary Vote for ID Cards Unanimous?

No it wasn’t.

Both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have stated that they are against the whole scheme and would scrap it if they came into office.

The House of Lords also rejected the ID scheme five times in a row, before a compromise was reached that allowed for an initial opt-out from 2008.

What Information Will Be Stored About Us?

The government has tried to allay some fears about British ID cards, stating that they won’t store Person-Indentifying Information such as ethnicity, sexuality, religious views, criminal record, health or political leanings.

How Does the Scheme Affect Me Getting a New Passport?

From 2012, British citizens and residents will to go to privately-run “biometric enrolment centres” to be fingerprinted and probably interviewed, when we apply for a first or new passport.

The newly formed Identity and Passport Service will carry out a “background check” on all applicants to establish that they are who they say they are. Relevant details will be entered into the National Identity Register and the new passport will be issued along with the option of having an ID card.

Will the ID Cards Cost Much?

The starting fee for a stand-alone British ID card in 2009 and 2010 will, apparently, be £30 or less. This may increase over time.

As detractors of the British ID card and National Identity Register have correctly identified, there is no proven correlation between the existence of ID cards and benefits in combating terrorism.

Terrorism, in this case, can be defined as the deliberate use of violence, or the deliberate threat of extreme violence, against civilians in order to achieve stated political goals. So by this measure terrorism becomes a definable and illegal tactic that private citizens, organised groups and even governments and state institutions can be held accountable for, instead of simply a subjective discourse about motivations where “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”.

How can ID cards combat terrorism then? Well that is the crux of the problem. In terms of stopping unexpected acts of violence (like a bombing of a petrol station), ID cards will have a limited utility and indeed the government hasn’t suggested that their introduction would be able to stop such ‘random’ acts of terror completely, simply because they ARE unexpected and apparently random.

What ID cards can help to do is to first weed out the varios radicals and militant demagogues who do not have legal residency within the UK. It is harder to hide within the faceless masses of British citizenry if all people are required to identify who they are, what their nationality-status is and where they live. Harder, but admittedly not impossible.

So there is an element of ‘keeping tabs’ on certain people, which could indeed lead to abuse if the insufficient check and balances are not put into place.

Turkey requires that all its citizens carry ID with them at all times and yet this had not stopped terrorist attacks within that country, as critics of the British ID scheme have pointed out. However, it is reasonable to suggest that as the system suggested by the British government is far more ambitious and technologically advanced than anything that exists outside of the UK and indeed as Britain as a country has a well established and very organised (some might say regimented) state infrastructure, it is possible that the British experience of ID cards and combating terrorism might be different from the Turkish one.

Besides anything else, Britain is much smaller than Turkey and has less places to hide – not that it is impossible for would-be terrorists to hide in the UK, rather that it would be hard for secret militias to train and mobilise within the UK than it is for them to do in such a large country as Turkey with so many areas of wilderness.

So the current absence of a definite correlation between ID cards and an increased utility in the fight against terrorism may yet prove to be circumstantial to the type of ID card and state in question rather than implicit to ID cards in themselves. Time will undoubtedly tell.

Being able to prove who we are is a fundamental part of modern life.  The government has stated that we need a more robust and secure way to check that identities are real and that people are who they say they are.

As more and more people shop and bank online the sheer amount of personal information, like PINs, passwords and security questions, increase with them, because we quite rightly need to prove our identity every time we wish to access these services.

As examples, we generally have to prove we are who we say we are whenever we:

- join a library,

- open a new bank account or apply for some sort of loan or credit,

- travel to other countries,

- apply for state benefits

- collect a mail and parcels from the sorting office.

As things stand at the moment, the current means to check someone’s identity is to require some sort of official document (like a passport) along with a utility bill that confirms a living address. Whereas this system works, it is open to abuse from identity fraudsters because there is no defined standard, so different organisations and services confirm identity in different ways using different documents. Also, utility bills and related documents can be altered or forged quite easily or indeed they can be stolen and uses to assume false identities.

As discussed in previous articles, passports may, and indeed have, been be issued to people who should not otherwise be allowed them; foreign nationals have been able to live and work in Britain illegally; public services (such as state benefits) are routinely abused by people who are not entitled to receive them; all sorts of serious criminals (including terrorists) are known to use multiple identities to throw a veil over their activities.

Hence the government believes we need to bring a more consistent and coherent means of battling all of these.

CETA, the 4,000 strong network of insurance intermediaries, is urging its brokers to promote identity theft insurance.

The risk of this type of fraud is increasing for UK consumers; losses from plastic cards used for Internet, telephone and mail purchases totalled £290.5 million in 2007, although CETA believes the figure could be much higher.

While the crime is mainly associated with credit card fraud, identities are also being stolen to open bank accounts, divert mail and apply for social benefits and mortgages.

According to the network’s managing director, David Quick, identity theft insurance is relatively cheap and can provide invaluable practical assistance to victims.

Mr Quick is concerned that many organisations do not appear to look after customers’ records well and that as criminals become more resourceful, consumers are beginning to live in fear of identity fraud.

The Financial Services Authority has recently completed a survey of the data security systems of 39 firms in the financial services sector and has gone on to warn that businesses must do more to protect customers’ personal data.