How to prevent the identity theft

Identity theft is the most critical problem which is happening in today’s world.

Identity theft

Identity theft occurs when someone uses your information such as your name, number, or credit card number, without your permission, to commit fraud or other crimes. It is a serious offense committed by the sniper. While some identity theft victims can resolve their problems quickly, others spend hundreds of dollars and many days repairing damage to their good name and credit record.

Umbrella of identity theft

• Breaks you email account and send phishing spam from your email id to your friends and relatives
• Steals your banking username and password and washes out all your money in your accounts
• Steals your social security number, use your credit card, cell phone and other accounts in your name

Here are the tips you can follow to secure and protect your personal information and ensure that your identity or your credit has not been compromised.

• Be aware when you use your atm card in the atm machine, shops or at the computer. Make sure that no one watches you when you enter the pin number.
• Buy a personal shredder and shred all your bills, credit card statements, old cards, atm receipt with PII on them before disposing it.
• Make sure that all your data’s has been completely, utterly and irrevocably destroyed in the computer system, hard drive, CD, DVD because any one with the little technical knowledge can restore all the deleted files. Use a software to delete all the data’s permanently. In case of CD and DVD try to break that because it can also be recovered.
• Never send your paid bills through the mail because if your mail account has be stolen then all your bills statements and account number will be stole ,hence if you want to pay your bills just pay it through the post office. Drop your bills at the post office or at least in an official U.S. Postal Service drop box to ensure that doesn’t happen.
• Don’t give out the personal information over the phone unless you can positively confirm the caller's identity.
• Review your monthly statements regularly so that you will be aware if one of them doesn’t arrive and that can alert you that perhaps someone stole it from your mailbox or while it was in transit
• Try to get your new cheque book in the bank itself and don’t ask the bank employers to send the cheque book through the courier.
• Try to change your online password regularly and make sure that you create your passwords with the combination of letters, numbers and special characters, so that it will be very tough to track the passwords.
• Make sure that your bank doesn’t print your social security number in the personal checks.
• Don’t write your account number on the outside of the envelopes containing bill payments
• Awareness is the most important aspect of any computer-security scheme, so monitor all your online and financial accounts--and change your password regularly.

Due to the identity theft many customers have lost their job opportunities, loans for education, housing and car. In rare cases, they may even be arrested for crimes they did not commit. In such situation if you were arrested for the crime then you may contact the criminal defense attorneys in Houston. You may contact the criminal defense lawyer in Houston for the free initial consultation.