10 Places Identity Thieves Lurk

The Federal Trade Commission considers identity theft to be the fastest growing crime in America. With between 9 and 10 million new victims a year, the crime is catching on quick and constantly evolving due to advancements in technology. No one is exempt from the clutches of this crime. So, it’s important that you do everything you can to protect yourself—and those you love—from identity theft.

One of the best ways you can do that is to learn where identity thieves hang out, and how you can avoid providing them with your personal information unknowingly.

10 Places Identity Thieves Lurk

1. Gym parking lots. It may sound like a funny place for identity thieves to spend time, but this is a location that has proven to be ripe for the harvest. Identity thieves scour gym and fitness center parking lots looking for people who get out of their cars and head into the gym without gym bags. Everyone needs to have their wallet on them when driving to the gym, but many people don’t want the hassle of having to take a purse or a wallet inside the gym with them since that would involve renting a locker. So, they leave their wallets somewhere in their cars—inside of a glove box or hidden under a sweatshirt in the backseat. Identity thieves know that the average person hits the gym for at least one hour, so that gives the thief plenty of time to break into the car and rifle through it’s contents. Early morning or late evening gym goers are especially susceptible to this type of crime since thieves can break into cars with a lower chance of being noticed at those hours. In some cases, thieves physically steal credit cards and wallets. In other cases, they try to get into vehicles and steal account numbers leaving everything right where it was when the gym-goer left. 

2. Residential streets. War driving has become increasingly popular in identity theft cases. Thieves use this method to try to hack into people’s personal home computers without ever having to set foot inside their houses. Instead, thieves take a wireless laptop and drive up and down streets looking for homes (or even businesses) that are using wireless connections with unencrypted servers. Once they locate one, they can easily gain access to that server and any information stored there. If you pay bills, do online banking, or engage in any similar activities on the internet, your information could be pilfered by thieves without you even knowing it. Invest in firewall and encryption software. They may save your identity.

3. Online social networking sites. Blogging and having Facebook, MySpace or other similar profiles can be a fun way to keep in touch with old friends or family members. But these social networkig sites can also be great places for identity thieves to harvest information about you if you aren’t careful. This is especially true if your email address is posted in public view, and you are inadvertently giving clues to what your online passwords (or the answers to your security questions) might be. An email address is half of the information a thief would need to log onto any of your online financial accounts. Don’t reveal too much about yourself online. Real friends should know some of your personal information anyway, without you posting it online and exposing yourself to identity theft. You may also want to consider having a private email account you use solely for online financial transactions. That way, no one would know any of your login information.

4. ATM machines. Although it may seem bizarre for identity thieves to hang out at the scene of their crime, it is not uncommon for some to lurk around ATM machines where they have installed some sort of key logging device or some type of film that traps your card in the machine. Some thieves have been known to stand in line behind a victim (even filling out deposit slips and envelopes as if they were really next in line to make a transaction). Then when your card becomes stuck in their trap and you begin to panic, they try to act like good Samaritans and come to your rescue. Pretending to help, they’ll ask for your PIN code and type it in trying to retrieve your card. But, of course it won’t work because the thief’s booby-trap is still in place. Once you leave the bank frustrated by the “machine that ate your card” the thief will return to the ATM, eject your card and reinsert it (along with your PIN code) and withdraw as much cash as possible from your account.

5. Restaurant parking lots. Identity theft is usually an advanced crime that involves elaborate rings and partnerships that make it more difficult to trace a crime back to one person. Many identity thieves seek to build alliances with waiters and waitresses who regularly run customer’s credit cards when people pay for their meals. Identity thieves enlist the help of restaurant wait staff and offer them significant amounts of money if they are willing to slide each card twice—once to truly pay for the meal, and a second time in a hand-held skimmer that will store the customer’s card info for use by the thief at a later date. Hand offs for this kind of activity usually takes place behind restaurants when the waiters or waitresses go on break or get off for the night.         

6. Offices. A high percentage (some experts even claim the majority) of identity theft cases can be traced back to the thief’s place of employment. Some thieves strategically apply for certain jobs so they can gain access to sensitive company, employee or client information. Even if they don’t have access to the information they need, they work at gaining a co-worker’s trust or wait for people with access to make a mistake and leave the information unguarded or divulge a security access code. These people then either use the information they have obtained for their own gain, or they turn around and sell it to someone else for a pretty penny.

7. Gas stations. With the convenience factor of pay at the pump gas stations, most Americans don’t think twice before swiping their cards before getting gas. Many are distracted by other things—cell phone calls, children or the need to run into the mini-mart and grab a snack or use the bathroom. Because people are less aware of what machines should really look like, it has become increasingly easy for identity thieves to affix card readers, keystroke loggers or other tools to gas pumps that will allow the machine to read the card and authorize the purchase, while simultaneously storing the information in a component that thieves can later remove and harvest the information from. Some thieves have been known to attach devices to specific gas pumps and wait an entire year before coming back and removing it. That means victims might not notice that their card has been compromised for an entire year because it won’t be used until then.

8. Dumpsters. Most thieves still dig for information the old fashioned way: dumpster diving. That’s right. They especially like to rummage through dumpsters behind hospitals, corporations, university dorm rooms and apartment buildings. Many people still don’t heed all of the warnings about the importance of shredding, and they throw away important papers containing sensitive financial information. If thieves manage to get their hands on these papers they can terrorize people’s financial lives. It will literally take thieves minutes to undo the work people have spent years investing in creating a solid credit history, and the damage thieves do may take an entire lifetime to undo.

9. The black market. Many cyber identity thieves are part of an online underground usually run from anti-American countries. If your personal information has been stolen by an identity thief, there’s a good chance it could currently be in the process of being bought, sold or bartered for in an online chat room somewhere. Information that finds its way onto the black market may never be fully recovered as victims will have to spend years closely monitoring their personal information making sure they don’t keep getting hit by new thieves again and again.

10. Mailboxes. You get a lot of personal information in your mailbox. Bank statements, credit card bills, utility bills, etc…Each of those items could seem like a gold mine to an identity thief looking to steal your credit. In some cases, identity thieves steal mail from people’s mailboxes while they are not home. In other cases, thieves have mail rerouted to another address so they can pilfer through it and begin spending someone else’s money or opening new accounts in someone else’s name. If you typically place outgoing mail in your mailbox and alert the postman with a raised red flag, you are also alerting lurking identity thieves to the possible hot commodity awaiting them. Make sure you carefully guard all mail—both incoming and outgoing—and that you don’t give savvy identity thieves a chance to get their hands on it.

Now that you know where identity thieves lurk, you are equipped to protect yourself from falling into some of their favorite traps. Making a concerted identity protection effort yourself can do a lot to reduce your risk of identity theft.