I attended a fascinating presentation last night given by Tom Ilube, the CEO of online identity theft prevention company Garlik. Tom is also the ex-CIO of Egg.
Online identity fraudsters can apparently gather the information they need to steal your identity in 2-3 hours – something that used to take them days. By visiting your Facebook or LinkedIn page, company site, Flickr account and searching the online government archives, fraudsters can now get everything they need to mock up convincing passports, bank statements, utility bills – basically any document that they need to get credit.
When you stop to think about what’s online about you when the information is culled from all sources – your photos, CV, personal information, mother’s maiden name – you start to think differently about how you use the web.
If you, or any of your team, are thinking about starting blogs or exploiting social networking sites either for marketing purposes or personal use, Tom made some great points about protecting yourself online.
Start by using Google, or better still ZoomInfo or Wink, to search for yourself and see what’s already out there. His major two hints for keeping safe? Never put your personal mobile number or home address on anything.
There’s a lot more useful info on Tom’s blog and Garlik’s site. I’m off to Google myself…
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This episode of ‘Mischief’ on BBC 3 also highlighted how easy it is to find out everything about someone on the internet. The show’s host found out enough information about one public figure that she was able to apply for credit cards and bank accounts in his name. As someone who has had my debit and credit card information stolen, I am getting increasingly paranoid about ever using the internet for anything ever!
So much for my great idea on how to encourage people to join an ‘online community’: “Hello Sir. We, the owners of the National Bank of Uganda, encourage you to sign up to our forum to provide money-saving tips. Please for your username use you bank account number, and for your password use your sort code. We can guarantee that this information will not be used outside the National Bank.”
Back to the drawing board then…
Does this mean that social network profiles are like the garbage cans of the online world? Say no more.
Using online data sources (be it through Web 2.0 or not) is just the newest way of stealing personal information for potentially fraudulent use. Since people saw Day of the Jackal in 1963 (one of the first examples in film of the ways you could assume a new identity) when Edward Fox ‘borrowed’ multiple identities, people have been aware of identity fraud. The film even showed how to do it! If you put huge amounts of personal information online its foolish to assume you’re not opening yourself up to risk.
I just used zoominfo to look myself up (no results, thank goodness!) but they’ve got my boyfriend, father, and GRANDFATHER pegged. Scary stuff! I’ve gone back and rechecked all the passwords, privacy settings, etc. for my faebook, linkedin, amazon.com, ebay, paypal and email accounts. Now I’m getting paranoid!
A thought…
Perhaps, the National Banks of Uganda, Nigeria and elsewhere, who seem so keen to temporarily deposit enormous somes of money in one bank account or another after the untimely death of at least 15 of my distant relatives (so distant…) could be put in touch with the people at HBOS, RBS and various Icelandic banks and we could solve the whole thing rather amicably.
On an only tangentially related topic, I’m also offering some kind of virtual prize for the first person to submit a recipe for Credit Crunch. A snack of sorts? Or a pudding?
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