Protect Yourself from Online Identity Theft

Thieves are becoming more and more sophisticated when it comes to online identity theft. They are able to hack into accounts and pretty much take over your identity. Here are some ways you can protect yourself from online identity theft.

Many people create passwords to accounts that are easy for them to remember. Unfortunately, these passwords are easy for online identity thieves to crack and steal your information. These easy passwords are referred to as "weak" passwords.

Check your accounts and make sure you create "strong" passwords for them. By "strong", I mean using a combination of letters, numbers and even symbols in order to make your password harder for thieves to crack.

The downside of this of course is it's harder to remember these stronger passwords if you don't use them that often. What you don't want to do is email the passwords to yourself. A thief can hack into your email account and have access to your passwords.

Many social networking sites such as Facebook make it easy to share information with others. Some of that information can be personal like what city and state you live, your phone number, etc. It's important to check your profiles on these sites and make sure you're not sharing too much personal information that online identity thieves can use.

Go into your privacy settings on these social networking sites and delete any information that is too personal like your phone number or an address. With Facebook especially, make sure your profile information is shown to Friends Only. Their privacy settings change all the time, so you'll want to check them periodically.

A phishing scam is when you receive an email that looks like it came from a company or a bank that you may have done business with. The email usually states that they need to update their records and want you to provide some personal information in order to complete their records.

Sometimes the emails will state that they want to deposit money (refund) into your account. They just need your account information in order to complete the transaction.

Never click on the links in these emails. Even if it looks like it came from your bank or some other company you deal with. No bank or company is going to ask for your account information in an email. It's a scam.

If you have up-to-date anti-virus software, this should help get rid of these type of emails. So just check every now and then that your software is updated.

Hopefully the information above will help protect you from online identity theft.