Identity Theft: Tips Preventing You to Fall Victim!

Internet applications, especially, social media have provided freedom of sharing your personal information on your social network. Only that cybercriminals get a gap to intrude into your information and misuse it. Even though you are cautious about your privacy, still a lot of your critical information is on stake. If users allow access of their profiles to third party applications, their information becomes more vulnerable to Identity theft.

Identity Theft
When some criminal takes on another person’s identity by stealing their personal information and misusing it; this is called Identity Theft. Often, identity theft includes credit card frauds and email scams etc. Identity theft incidents occur not only to the individuals but to the businesses also, when imposters represent themselves as a part of the organization and misuse the business information for their personal gains.

How to get protected from identity theft
Identity theft attacks are very common in this growing world of techgeeks. However, you can protect yourself from being a victim of such attacks by using following tips:

1.Use Common Sense
Common sense is the biggest protector of an internet user. You can avoid a big part of cyber crimes happening to you just by using your common sense. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are the new sources of cybercriminals to collect your crucial information.

Most of the identity theft victims are the people who share their important information unnecessarily on the social network. Here are the points to remember:

• Never share the pictures of your paychecks, identity cards etc.
• Never share your social security number
• Avoid sharing your complete address and date of birth
• Do never share your debit/credit card details

2. Protection of Social Security Number
Social Security card is very important document. Maximum of your personal information is associated with this and that’s why it is important to protect it from any type of sneaking. Don’t carry your SSN or other id cards everywhere and do not disclose your SSN to anyone.

3. Use Reputable Protection Software
Information theft or identity theft just not happens through social media but also from the spying of a computer or a network. Because of it, almost every internet user understands the need of antivirus and antispyware and firewall programs for their security. Keeping them up-to-date is similarly necessary.
Today, there are several identity theft protection programs available in market which are specifically designed to monitor the device from latest theft schemes and patterns so that they can protect the users from such encounters. You can also invest in these programs.

4. Optimization of Privacy Settings
One important step towards identity protection is optimization of privacy settings of your various social accounts. Edit your default privacy settings to make it more secure and less vulnerable. For example-

•Make your social media profiles private rather than public
•Limit your ‘Who can see your post’ setting to only friends
•Enable manual approval for friend requests
•Manual approval for tagging and posts which mentions you

5. Refrain from Over-Sharing
On social media, we share a lot of information in excitement, which is harmful sometimes. So, consider twice before posting if a piece of information is not too much of exposure of your privacy. Avoid filling any forms or surveys which are intended to be viewable to general public.

Bottom Line
Internet is a great source of knowledge for everyone, even for the hackers and crooks. Identity theft incidents have become very common because of too much mediums of collecting the online information. BE smart and act smartly while using internet for sharing your information. Apply the above tips to stay safe and secure and enjoy your internet experience to the fullest.
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