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Identity theft is using someone else’s personal information like their name, identifying numbers, password, PIN, security question answers, financial details, fingerprint, voice, or iris pattern to commit fraud or other crimes. Portrayed perhaps rather hilariously in movies like Identity Thief, having one’s identity stolen can have unpleasant implications that are not funny at all. It can lead to significant financial trouble, for example, if the imposter attempts to max out credit cards or buy properties in the victim’s name. The thief can even go so far as to commit serious crimes leaving the victim to face legal repercussions.
Investigations have shown that identity thieves have started relying heavily on high-tech means like malware and data breaches. So, protecting your information by guarding your mail, wiping one’s hard drives clean after use, or just being careful in general to avoid phishing doesn’t guarantee that one will be safe. Therefore, one has to adopt technological measures to ensure safety examples of which follow.
Encryption is used by businesses to thwart efforts to access customers’ private information like their Social Security numbers, account or routing numbers, or credit or debit card PINs. It works by scrambling the information using an algorithm, so from the point of sale to when the data is sent to the bank, the scammer cannot steal the data because they don’t have the tools to decipher the message.
Companies like EuroPay, Visa, and Mastercard put security chips in the credit and debit cards which require the customer to provide some sort of authorization, e.g., a signature or a PIN, to ensure that it is their customer making the transaction. If the PIN or the signature does not match the one stored in the chip, the card is declined, and the company alerts the customer of the potential theft. During online payments, two-step authentication replaces the need for a PIN or signature, so the safety of the customer’s information or money is always ensured.
This technology eliminates the need for debit or credit cards and reduces the amount of information merchants store. Furthermore, suppose the device, usually a smartphone, used to pay using this technology is stolen. In that case, the customer is assured that their information remains safe because it is never stored on the device— at least not in a way that will allow data to be accessed without verification of ID by the device using touch or facial recognition.
In addition to the ones mentioned above, several other solutions have been developed to counteract the problem of identity theft, e.g., devices that match the person’s voice, iris, or fingerprint. Still, sadly it continues to be a very serious issue almost everywhere in the world today. The most developed countries report an astounding number of cases that only seem to increase yearly; e.g., the United States saw the number of serious cases more than double from about 0.65 million in 2019 to 1.8 million in 2020.
