The theft that could lead to endless headaches for the victim

The Record often receives complaints from residents who have been defrauded due to identity theft. According to security practitioner Louis Grobler this is more prevalent than we realise.

Grobler made the following suggestions so the public can avoid falling prey to this crime.

1. Watch for shoulder-surfers. When entering a PIN number or a credit card number at an ATM machine, at a phone booth, or even on a computer at work, be aware of who is nearby and make sure nobody is peering over your shoulder to make a note of the keys you’re pressing.

2. Require photo ID verification. Rather than signing the backs of your credit cards, you can write “See Photo ID”. In many cases, store clerks don’t even look at the signature block on the credit card, and a thief could just as easily use your credit card to make online or telephone purchases that don’t require signature verification. However, for those rare cases when they do actually verify the signature, you may get some added security by directing them to also make sure you match the picture on the photo ID.

3. Shred everything. One of the ways that would-be identity thieves acquire information is through ‘dumpster-diving’ or trash-picking. If you are throwing out bills and credit card statements, old credit cards or ATM receipts, medical statements or even junk-mail solicitations for credit cards and mortgages, you may be leaving too much information laying about. Buy a personal shredder and shred all papers with personal information on them before disposing of them.

4. Destroy digital data. When you sell, trade or otherwise dispose of a computer system, or a hard drive, or even a recorded CD, DVD or backup tape, you need to take extra steps to ensure the data is completely, utterly and irrevocably destroyed. Simply deleting the data or reformatting the hard drive is nowhere near enough. Anyone with a reasonable tech skill can re-install deleted files or recover data from a formatted drive. Make sure that data on hard drives is completely destroyed. For CD, DVD or tape media you should physically destroy it by breaking or shattering it before disposing of it.

Read more:

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