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'Tis the season for ID theft
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - This holiday season, there's one gift you
don't want to give -- your identity. But there are a slew of con
artists trying to get just that.
"Shoppers are looking for bargains and are easier to fall prey to
cons and scams," said Neal O'Farrell, founder of My Security Plan, a
security firm specializing in cybercrime and identity theft.
Consumers should be particularly alert for "phishing" e-mails,
the most common scam this season, accordong to O'Farrell.
Phishing attacks trick consumers into divulging sensitive
financial information by imitating correspondence from legitimate
businesses, say, Citibank or Amazon.com.
A recent survey by e-mail security firm MailFrontier forecast
more than 750 million phishing e-mails will be sent between Nov. 26
and Dec. 24, a 30 percent increase from the previous month. Even
that estimate could be low.
"Right now it is tracking higher than that," said Andrew Klein,
anti-fraud product manager at MailFrontier.
Even worse, the scams are getting more sophisticated.
It had been that the only way you could be hurt by a phishing
e-mail was to respond to it. Con artists are now deploying "phishing
traps," that lure victims into clicking on an image (say, with
something advertised as a coupon) that contains code able to monitor
your keystrokes and look for account passwords.
Scammers are also putting a new spin on some old phishing
schemes, O'Farrell says. Phony e-mail receipts and shipping
notifications have been around for a while, but consumers are less
alert during the holidays because they are dealing with and
expecting to see more purchase confirmations.
E-mail greeting cards may also contain hidden viruses or worms
programmed to snare confidential financial information. O'Farrell
advises consumers to be wary of e-cards that contain an attachment,
instead reading only those that link to a Web-based card.
Get that Grinch
You have about 60 days from the day you receive your credit card
or banking statements to contest any unauthorized charges. Also,
repairing the damage fraudulent charges does to your credit report
can take several months, if not years.
On average, victims of identity theft spend 600 hours and $1,400
in out-of-pocket expenses cleaning out their records, according to
the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego.
"Most identity theft is a crime of opportunity," O'Farrell noted.
"Protecting yourself is doing a lot of little things, not one or two
big things."
Some of those little things include:
- Ordering our credit report with all three major credit bureaus
-- Experian,
Equifax, and
TransUnion--
at least once a year to check for errors,
- Storing your checkbook as well as your credit card and bank
statements in a safe place,
- Using a paper shredder to destroy sensitive financial
documents,
- Printing only your first initial and last name your checks.
O'Farrell says it makes it harder for thieves to forge your
signature,
- Dropping bills off at Post Office instead of depositing it in
an unlocked mailbox,
- Sweeping your computer for spyware or viruses before doing any
online banking,
- Using a professional data-erasing program to delete old files
before you toss out your computer. O'Farrell recommends
Data Cleaner and
Cyberscrub.
Source:
CNN Money
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