When you think about buying and selling products online, you probably imagine eBay or Amazon.com. However, the identity thief has different ideas. He or she goes to underground trading channels and buys and sells credit card numbers and personal information. And this information can be gotten for low, low prices of as little as $5 for certain items. See the Dateline video on our home page for proof.
This so-called online black market is most likely here to stay – and business is booming. According to an article by Brad Reed of Network World, Symantec, maker of the popular Norton antivirus software, recently published a report on the state of the market. It found that it currently holds over $270 million in information and other goods – 16% of that being identity theft information and a whopping 59% reserved for credit card accounts.
Could your information be involved in this ring around the Web? While odds are that it isn’t at present, there is no way to rule out the thought completely or know that it won’t make its way there in the future. That’s because people don’t release their information to the trade voluntarily. An identity thief takes it upon him or herself to procure it. And, since business seems to be pretty darn good, there’s no doubt that thieves will continue to take advantage.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to completely prevent your identifying information from falling into the wrong hands. But once it’s there it’s better to find out ASAP than to learn about it when your credit rating suddenly plummets for no particular reason.
One thing you can do to stay ahead of the game as much as possible is invest in identity theft protection.
Many protection plans offer services that will scour the Web for you to look for your information in the most popular underground markets. Once such plan is LifeLock’s eRecon. If you sign up for this service in conjunction with a complete protection plan, LifeLock will look for your Social Security number, driver’s license number, email address and credit card account numbers and notify if any are spotted.
Since it’s very difficult to do this yourself and you could get caught up in some legal trouble for frequenting the underground sites, a plan such as this is definitely your best bet. Other identity protection companies that include this service that we highly recommend include Identity Guard, TrustedID and Identity Force.
Besides that, all you can do is keep your information safe as best you can. Don’t respond to unsolicited emails requesting personal information (these phishing emails are the source of a good deal of the information on the black market), never enter personal data on a website unless you’re sure it’s legitimate (as there are faked and spoofed sites being created all the time) and shred credit cards, bank statements and other financial paperwork before you throw it in the trash or the recycling bin (some thieves will be happy to dig through for account numbers). The reality is, you never know who’s looking to make that next big sale or trade, so don’t make it easy for them to get their hands on the merchandise.