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When technology has become integral to daily life, identity theft protection services are becoming increasingly important. With Legal Shield, rest assured that your credentials are secured.
The dawn of the digital age has brought about plenty of benefits, the most beneficial of which is the digitization of information. This trend is significant to businesses and institutions worldwide because all parties can access digital information easily and quickly: employees, customers, and stakeholders. While digitization reduces the need for physical documents and associated items, it allows for swift exchange over vast distances. It also makes information substantially easier to store in as little space as possible and retrieve effortlessly.
But the digitization of information comes not without cost. Because the systems used for storing data are the same systems that ordinary people use daily, identity theft has become much more effortless. And recently, there has been a steep rise in its occurrence.
There are many ways that identity theft can happen, and it is usually committed by using someone’s personal information in transactions or defrauding institutions by using someone’s identity. The way it works is because all over the internet, people leave a digital paper trail or, more often than not, publicly showcase personal details on their social media.
There are many news stories about people waking up only to find out their credit card information has been stolen by a coffee shop owner and her goons and their hard-earned money funneled to another account. Or, someone’s at a party, and their wallet gets stolen, along with their IDs, debit cards, etc., and now a loan shark is calling them to pay for a loan they never took out. Identity theft is such a big problem that the FTC received 2.8 million fraud reports from consumers in 2021, all amounting to a loss of $5.8 billion!
Children Are Becoming Regular Targets for Identity Theft
Identity theft affects not only the older generation, and newer generations—Gen Z and Millennials—are reporting more instances of identity theft now than ever before. In the United States, some children as young as eight years old already have a social media account; they can access YouTube and Google Playstore. Playing video games online can result in a six-year-old racking up $16,000 in his mother’s cards. And that was without an active element like a swindler doing so. Imagine if someone had been talking to the kid.
Medical Identity Theft Is Quickly Becoming an Easy Method
As has been seen in recent years with covid, medical security is essential. But this awareness has made it a prime target for identity fraud. Acquiring someone’s medical information is relatively straightforward, especially considering that most hospitals and healthcare institutions lack a robust system for protecting patient data. A thief merely needs to call the hospital and ask a few questions or rummage through the trash for discarded medical documents—and everything is smooth-sailing. Medical identity theft can run the gamut from defrauding health insurance to medical loans. These misappropriations do not just lead to financial loss but the loss of healthcare access and vulnerability to legal charges.
People Are Becoming More Reckless Online
Security breaches have hounded social media since its inception and rollout. These infractions have resulted in millions of people’s personal information being stolen and compromised. The general lack of authentication features has also made it relatively easy to impersonate business owners, celebrities, or someone’s acquaintances. The most famous internet con would be the Nigerian Prince scam during the prevalence of email chains. Still, variations of this approach have flourished in the reign of social media, such as relatives needing help for an emergency, old friends looking to reminisce, and lonely singles wanting to meet someone new.
Black Markets for Personal Information Have Become Widespread
As with all commodities, illegal trade of it will eventually emerge. It is no different with people’s information. There is a rich and busy market for personal data through Discord servers, online forums, Facebook chat groups, etc. Anyone with a few bucks can acquire batches of information and do with it however they please.
What Should You Do?
Although it might seem difficult to perceive a solution, LEGAL SHIELD has plenty. Offering efficient and affordable legal counsel for 4.5 million individuals and 140,000 businesses across North America for 40 years, LEGAL SHIELD guarantees the best course of action to help you and your family defend against fraud with their identity theft protection services.
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