While offline identity theft and fraud remains the most prominent (shoulder surfing, dumpster diving, home break-ins and countless others) it seem cyberspace is doing its best to close the gap.
This does not mean the high profile data breaches we hear about in the news. Although they do their part to raise the anxiety of being online it is still the low level day to day identity thefts that cause the greatest concern.
As of late social network has been feeling the strain. Places like Facebook are in a period of incredible growth and success. So many are joining these places and happily sharing personal information about themselves. The online community for many of them is just as real as anything the offline world has to offer.
Nothing wrong with that. Many of us have made friends across the globe and are better people because of it.
No doubt identity thieves hope that people continue to make more friends, refer more people to join in the social networking phenomenon and keep sharing all that good personal information.
Because as Detective Superintendent Brian Hay, from Queensland's Fraud and Corporate Crime Group tells Tony Bartlett of The Age,"Anyone who joins a social networking site can have a look at random almost, and pick up people's dates of birth, where they work and family details. That's gold to people who want to steal identities."
It's also not new. A few years back MySpace was the leader when it came to social network websites. But it got hit pretty hard when many fraudsters used it to set up phishing scams.
With places like Facebook it arguably does not take that much effort since a great deal of the information is readily volunteered by the online participants. Identity thieves are as Detective Hay puts it,"...building empires of massive identity warehousing stocks."
It is also no help that these crimes are the least reported. Some of it may be out of embarrassment others just don't care and many others just are not paying enough attention to it.
Hopefully in the places like Facebook will be able to implement more security features in the future but it really comes down to the individual and the nature of social networking. The whole point is to share information. It's a dilemma that identity thieves are no doubt going to be exploiting for some time to come
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