ID Fraud in Small Towns
When you hear the words "identity theft," big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles immediately spring to mind. It's hard to imagine the crime entering the sphere of a smaller town, where everybody knows one another. Though media statistics will mainly point to large, bustling cities as being frequent targets of identity theft, there's also a growing number of cases in smaller cities all across the US. It's the kind of list no city wants to be on. But with the proliferation of advanced ID theft activity, no city or town is immune.
In most small towns and cities where the population barely tops 400,000, most residents know their postal worker, butcher, bank teller and neighbors by name. Residents also know what's going on in their towns at all times, whether it's a church charity event, a school dance, or a neighbor away on vacation. It's what essentially results in citizen surveillance, something that makes a community safer and less prone to unusual, outside activity.
But it's also one of the things that can make a town vulnerable to theft of the most stealth kind. A known fact about isolated incidents of identity theft is that it the perpetrator is someone the victim knows to some capacity. A little knowledge such as the full names of you and your family members, where you bank and where you live are basics for which a potential thief can build a considerable amount of data with which to steal your identity.
On a larger scale, ID theft can target small towns with a population of 400 to the next town over with that of 4 million. Unfortunately, today's high tech society makes these advanced cases of identity fraud even more possible. With merely a laptop computer and a few pieces of illegitimate equipment, thieves can steal identities in the sleepy town of Brandon, Ohio all the way from “Sin City” Las Vegas, Nevada.
You don't have to venture all the way to Chicago to put yourself at risk. Residents from the small town of Gainesville, Texas had their debit card details stolen and used for fraudulent purchases. A local bank received numerous call regarding unauthorized charges and found a common link to all 400 customers—a trip to a local fast food chain. A magnetic swipe reader planted at the location is said to have been the culprit.
More and more cases of mass identity theft have been surfacing from all over the world, targeting locations across the US. Thieves have learned that focusing on one database is much more lucrative than going after one person. One of the most recent and largest credit card fraud cases involved the theft of a group of companies such as Barnes & Noble, TJX Companies, Office Max and more. A complex network of at least eleven thieves was charged.
The rapid growth of fraud cases everywhere has quashed the myth that it only happens in big cities. The fact is, identity theft and fraud can happen anywhere at any time. And it doesn't discriminate based on who you are, what you do, and in this case, where you live.
