Identity Theft Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Identity Theft - Essay Example The main focus is on the theft of identity using computer. The next section aims at explaining what Identity theft means furthering which the problems are touched upon. The loss and misuse of personal identification information is called Identity theft. Personal identification information like a social security number, name, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, phone number, etc. act as the only information that identify an individual. This information is used for different purposes like opening a bank account, stealing money, pension payouts or to gain any other benefits. The loss of any of the information can help the id thieves to use this and create a new id for themselves. The thieves become the accused and the person whose id is stolen becomes the victim. A victim can face major consequences with the loss of identity. The misuse of identity of an individual can lead the individual to suffer from bad credits, incorrect criminal acquisitions (Consumer Report, 2008). With the constant improvements in technology, there has also been an increase in the mis-utilisation of the available technology to steal people’s identities or other types of frauds. One of the biggest issues has been that of the influence of Internet over the increase of the frauds. With the increased usage of the Internet, it has been noted that there have been an increase fraudulent activities over the Internet as well. There is a lot of information that flows around the Internet at any given point in time, with the increased usage of the Internet for different facilities like payments of bills, online bookings, e- shopping, etc (Chad, 2004). All these activities involve a lot of personal information floating all over the Internet. The Internet identity theft differs from the normal form of identity theft in a number of ways. In this form of theft the victim will not be