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Identity theft is when someone else assumes your personal information and poses as you. Therefore it’s not only just a question of stealing credit card numbers. There are several ways and places where your personal information can be stolen by the identity thieves.

There are four different categories of identity theft; they include business or commercial identity theft, identity cloning, criminal identity theft, and financial identity theft.

People use identity theft for different reasons. There are those who can use identity theft to blackmail someone, use it for terrorist activities, or illegal immigration. Identity cloning is mostly used for online credit card processing. Those who use identity theft for non financial purposes could use them to get attention for the victim’s achievement, which is also referred to as media identity theft.

Financial identity theft is mostly used for bank fraud whereby the identity thief is able to impersonate someone else and manage to obtain a loan from a financial institution by presenting all the accurate information of the victim to the bank, especially if the transaction is carried out online.

This type of crime is referred to as non-self-revealing and it’s quite common since the perpetrator doesn’t have to show his face. However, if the funds are released, the authorities can still be able to track down the criminal. Once the money is given, the financial institution is never paid back whereas the criminal keeps the money while the victim is accused of defaulting on a loan that was never authorized by the victim.

In cases of identity concealment and cloning, the criminal impersonates the victim by acquiring the victim’s personal identifiers for the sole reason of concealing himself from the authorities. This is mostly done by people working in foreign countries, a person who wants to avoid arrest or someone who wants to avoid other individuals or creditors.

This kind of identity theft crime is known to go on for a long period of time, and the perpetrator may go on to obtain fraudulent IDs that go as far as making the criminal more authentic .

Most of these criminals get the personal identifiers of their victims from dumpster diving, shoulder surfing, smart cards, or by infiltration of organizations that keep large amounts of personal information. Even social online network services that happen to expose the personal details of users can be an easy target for identity thieves.

When there is a serious breach of privacy, the possibility of a criminal getting your personal identifiers becomes much easier. As much as some of the personal identifiers are got through burglary or theft, the best strategy for potential victims is to protect themselves from such thieves by whatever means possible by ensuring that their personal information is safe and secure at all times. ?

Bill Protresi is an online providing tips and advice. Visit Bill at Articles Concerning Identity Theft.