Identity Theft Check

PII is the information that identifies someone as an existent and ‘legal’ person, or which gives direct access to a private individual’s or company’s person or resources, and as such is the primary means to an end for identity criminals.

PII includes any piece of personal information that can lead to breaches of personal, financial and legal security. In other words, a PPII is any piece of information that can be used to identify, locate, contact and/or utilise some of the personal/private resources/possessions of a particular person, whether that person wishes you to or not.

Thanks largely to the information-technology boom of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and most specifically the development of the internet, it has become much easier for us to find out PII of other people. Indeed almost all of us have experienced at least one small element of this free dissemintaion and accessibility of personal information in the form of junk mail through our front doors and in our email inboxes. If we didn’t specifically ask for these correspondences and give our details so we could receive them, how and why did they come to us?

Simply put, there is a massive international market for PII and all kinds of individuals, legitimate companies, illicit organisations and even governments trade or otherwise disseminate our information on a regular basis – granted often for legitimate reasons that won’t effect us detrimentally, but also sometimes not.

Although there is no exhaustive and widely recognised and legal definition of what PII consists of, examples of personal information that can be put to illegal use in the wrong hands can include:

Your full name if it is uncommon
National Insurance / Identification Number
Bank / Building Society / Savings Account Numbers
Credit / Debit card numbers
Insurance policies and numbers
Home address and postal details
Driving license details
Vehicle registration plate number
Telephone numbers
E-mail addresses and passwords
Home or office computer IP address
Fingerprints
Personal signature
Private medical records

Of course this is not an exhaustive list by any measure, but all of the above can and indeed have been used for various sorts of identity crimes in the past. In the next article we will look out how these details can be acquired by criminals.