How To Prevent Online Identity Theft
There are many ways to prevent online identity theft and you should exercise all of them. When someone steals your identity, it can create quite a hassle for you. First of all, someone could get a credit card in your name and rack up extravagant charges. Someone could buy a car or even a house in your name or someone could just become you altogether and could walk around calling themselves by your name. Nobody wants that to happen to them but it could easily happen if you do any business transactions online. Preventing online identity theft is not difficult, you just have to know what to do.
Passwords
We have passwords for everything. We have passwords to log onto our email accounts, we need them to access our banking information, and we even need them to access our cell phone accounts. Regardless of what the password is used for, you need to create one that will not make online identity theft easy. Never use your birthday, for example, or your street address or your name. In other words, to prevent online identity theft, you need to create a password that would be very difficult for someone to guess. It should include numbers as well as letters and you should always use a different password for every application that requires one. Now, if you have trouble remembering those passwords, you might want to write them down somewhere safe. Just make sure nobody can find that list or else all your work to prevent online identity theft will be for nothing.
Always Log Off
When accessing your banking information, or any other business website, always log off when you are finished doing whatever you are doing. Never assume that by closing the browser, that the application is closed. You need to log off to prevent online identity theft because someone could potentially come along and open the browser again and access your information. This is especially important if the computer you're using is a public computer. Even if it's your own, and nobody else uses it, always log off. Someone could hack into your personal computer and steal your information and you wouldn't even know it.
Online identity theft is very common but if you use a few precautions, you should be just fine. To be on the safe side, always review your credit report to make sure nobody has gotten a credit line in your name. That should be all you need to do to make sure you haven't been the victim of online identity theft.
