Even if you think you’re safe from online identity theft, and you very well might be, here’s an article that should really make you consider getting Lifelock anyway. According to the San Luis Obispo County’s website, you’re identity is more threatened offline than online. This article certainly surprised me because when I think of identity theft I think someone hacking into a website where I’ve made a purchase or skimming my credit card number through an insecure port on some company’s site. What I don’t think about are the many, many ways that the same end result can be duplicated–just offline.

In the story mentioned in the article, the woman whose card was stolen spent “countless” hours on the phone trying to get things straightened out after her purse was stolen and her credit and debit cards were used fraudulently–including paying for a maternity bill. Wow; that takes…bravery on the part of the thief. According the consulting firm, Javelin:

“We are not saying (online access and data breaches) are not significant factors,” said James Van Dyke, Javelin’s president and founder. “But the point is that it has really been overblown. I think it is to the detriment of consumers to focus exclusively on these electronic methods of communication. Criminals don’t have a (bias) toward technology. They will use any channel that works.”

I think I speak for most regular netizens when I say that I sometimes even forget that people live without the use of the internet. Odds are there is an extremely large amount of the criminal population that has no idea how to steal your personal information online and will ultimately settle for the “old fashioned” way–to simply (and physically) steal your credit card(s). According to the article, almost 4% of the US population was hit with identity theft last year. That number is absolutely ridiculous–consider that the US has a population of well over 300,000,000 and do the math yourself. Granted, your odds of being hit are still lesser than they are greater, but if you haven’t considered getting Lifelock’s services now might be a good time to look into it; especially considering there’s a Lifelock promotion code to bring the cost of protecting your identity almost down to nothing.

Tags: lifelock

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:16 am and is filed under Individuals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.