How to Avoid Identity Theft Online

Identity theft happens when someone steals your personal information without your consent for their gains. It is one of the fastest growing crimes happening all around the world. 

Victims of identity theft can be anyone from an adult to a child. Adults are more often affected since they frequently share their personal informations online. The attackers with the stolen information may apply to credit cards, medical services and loans. Therefore suspiciously you might get bills and phone calls from these companies claiming you have done a purchase from them. 

There are 3 general categories of identity theft, those are the tax identity theft, medical identity theft and the social identity theft. Whatever the type of identity theft is one thing is guaranteed that this may cause heavy financial losses. While it is impossible to stop identity theft completely, you can reduce the risk by taking prevention measures. 

In this article, I will be guiding you on how to avoid identity theft online. At the end of this post, you will know how to avoid being a victim of identity theft.

1. Use Strong Passwords

The dream of every scammer is to find an account with weak password. Many do the mistake of using birthdays, phone numbers and names of family members as their passwords. Passwords that are easy to guess and not strong enough can be easily hacked by an attacker. 

Therefore use passwords that are at least 10 characters long and contains the combinations of letters, numbers and special symbols. And avoid using same passwords for every account and do not forget to change it frequently.

2. Be aware on Emails

Emails are one of the popular ways in which scammers seek your personal informations. In general they may send emails claiming they are from banks, companies and collages. Once the emails are clicked to open the malicious program gets downloaded to your computer. These programs track your personal informations on the system and send them to the scammers. 

However Email services contains spam filters which identifies these types of mails and remove them. But some cannot be identified easily, therefore it is better to avoid emails from strangers. 

3. Avoid Phishing Websites

Apart from legitimate websites there can be bogus sites from scammers seeking your personal informations. Most popularly they may ask your login details, credit card number, bank account number etc.... One of such famous way is from online shopping sites. Never provide your details or do transactions with sites that looks phishing. Look for the URL of the site whether they have HTTPS protocol enabled, these type of sites are generally considered safe. 

And always do transactions with well known shopping sites. If you are to do a transaction from an unknown site, do some researches about the site online.

4. Use Malware and Firewall Protections

Another popular way of scammers acquiring your personal informations is through Malwares. Malwares stay on your computer unknowingly and monitor all the work you do with the system. They send the information collected to the scammers for their personal gains. 

There are 2 popular ways for fighting against malwares, those are by using an anti malware protection or by enabling firewall. And don't forget to update your anti malware protection to the latest update to identity new types of threats.

5. Secure Wifi Network

A Wifi network which is unsecured is vulnerable to attacks. Scammers can hack your network and watch what you do online. Therefore never set your wifi open and protect it with a password. This way ensures that there is no any unauthorized access made to your private networks. 

And also avoid using public wifi as much as possible because many at times those may also be from scammers intending to steal your informations.

6. Be cautious on Social Media

While social media such as facebook is considered great time for pleasure, one negative side of it is we have to deal with strangers. Whatever the thing you post on social networking sites can be viewed by people on your friend list and general public. 

Perhaps valuable information needed by scammers such as address and phone numbers can be easily stolen through social media. However if you want to continue using social networking sites, you have to take some measures with them. One such is not sharing too much informations on them.