The Crime That Kills – How To Protect Yourself From Medical Identity Theft
According to the American Health Information Management Association, medical identity theft accounts for 3% of identity theft crimes. The NY Times reports that 250,000 people a year who have their identities stolen are medical identity theft cases.
If you are convinced that you are the victim of identity theft what to do starts with notifying the right people. The first thing that you should do is to notify the fraud and security department at all of your financial institutions. Let your bank and credit card companies know about the suspicious transactions, and ask them to freeze your accounts. Even though you may be able to start the process over the phone, be sure to take the proper steps toward filing a formal, written report with the institution so that you have a record for making your case later.
In some way this is more insidious than phishing. You open your browser, type in a web address and hit enter. Without getting too technical, basically what happens is that domain name servers (DNS) go about looking for and verifying the address you are requesting to be connected to.
Pharming attempts to intercept and reroute your connection request to a phony website; much like the ones that are waiting for you in the phishing email links. The site looks a lot like the real thing.
So as you enter your personal information it is captured by hackers who then use it to do what all thieves do. Rob you blind. This can take the form of raiding your account or opening up new lines of credit. One thing the thieves will not reroute is the bills, which will come directly to you.
The best way to deal with pharming is to make sure your web connections are secure particularly when you are attempting to visit a site that contains your personal information.
Hopefully if you are using online banking the financial institution is using a validation key verified by a trusted third party source. Check with the bank if you want to be sure.
After a three year decline, identity theft roared back to claim nine million victims in 2008. Even with the previous down turn, it remained the number one consumer complaint. With pharming on the loose it’s not too hard to figure out why
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Posted: September 3rd, 2010 under Uncategorized.
Tags: home selling, identity theft, mortgage, mortgage refinance
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