In my last post I discussed about identity theft and the different ways in which it may happen. In this I will tell a story to my readers about identity theft. Few of these stories I read in magazines or net journals and few happened with some of my friends and relatives.

The story that I will be including in this post is not so much scary that few identity fraud may shape into.

It’s about the Memorial blood center scam. This center takes blood on a voluntary basis. Since a huge number of people donates blood here so the personal records of the donors are also kept in the records. The records in the documents of the center contain the respective donors name and the social security numbers. These security numbers can give rise to the frauds to happen. If these numbers comes in the hand of the identity thieves then it can create lots of identity scams. A laptop which contained these records of the donors was stolen from Memorial Blood Centers. Can you imagine what can happen when a laptop with approximately 286000 donors’ records gets stolen!!

In downtown Minneapolis this happened while a blood drives on November 28th. As I said before that this was not a very scary scam because the data was protected with multiple password levels.

Another interesting fact is that the in the downtown of any major city has cameras all around. The same fact shows some light of hope the datas remaining secure. The security cameras for the various businesses in all over the building has records of the theft.

Identity theft is increasing day by day as the internet dependancy is also increasing in our day-to-day life. We are becoming more depended on the credit cards, online payments and falling a prey to identity thieves.  If someone uses the personal information of an individual and commits a fraud without informing the person about it then it falls under identity theft. I have seen many friends of mine loosing huge money for this kind of issues. In this fast world sometimes we don’t have any choice other than going for a online payment of a bill or using the credit card and here the hackers takes the advantage of stealing the personal information and using those information illegally.

Major damage may happen if some ones personal data is stolen. It is same as loosing some ones property or house. Some times these crimes go on for several years as the victim is not aware of the fact that his/her personal information is stolen. People who check their monetary transactions less often tends to ignore the fact that some mishap is happening in his/her transactions. The issue only strikes if a huge loss is seen. Frequent checking of the bills and the credit report is always desirable in order to minimize the risk of identity theft.

There are different categories of identity theft. I am including few in this post :

1)Credit card fraud
2)Banking fraud or Loan fraud
3)Phone utility fraud
4)Bankruptcy fraud etc.

Sometimes after knowing about identity fraud people are confused about the steps that he/she should take. The victim’s credit rating gets hampered for such a fraud for which getting a new credit card or loan becomes very tuff.