Criminals of the Information Age are crafty, underhanded, devious, and clever.  At one time, thieves merely picked pockets or robbed banks, but now with so much information store on computers and so many people knowing how to make computers sing their vaulted information, the crack down on criminal activity when it comes to identity theft takes tracking their moves online and in the world.  Thieves will resolve to do anything to get to private and personal information because here in the Information Age, information is money.  And money is King, but that doesn’t ring true for just the Information Age.  In the stealing of identities, criminals have been known to tap many different sources and among those sources are good old-fashioned stolen wallets.  The average person carries extremely personal and private information in their wallets.  Credit cards, identification with name and address and often birthday and sometimes-even social security information can be found in the folds of most wallets.  Stolen wallets and stolen paperwork also containing private information accounts for nearly half of all identity theft, according to a study done by Javelin Strategy and Research in 2009.  Online hacking, skimming, scamming, and spamming accounts for a surprisingly low 11% of all identity theft cases.  38% of victims found that their debit or credit cards had been stolen.  The physical card was not stolen in all cases, as the number alone can be used to do some damage as well.  37% of victims reported their identities stolen in the form of social security numbers being copied or fraudulently used without their knowledge.  36% of victims had their phone numbers in combination with their names fall into the wrong hands and 24% of the victims interviewed for the study by Javelin Strategy and Research in 2009 reported that their financial account numbers had been stolen.

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