文章作者：divine shadow - Fabio Ghioni
There are three kinds of identity theft: Financial Identity Theft: to obtain credit with another person’s credentials. Criminal Identity Theft: to defraud the public administration Identity Cloning: when the goal is the creation of a new identity to throw the police off the scent, to give papers to an alien immigrant or to a previous offender.
An identity thief could act in a concrete way too, for example running a credit card into a skimmer, a device that reads the data it contains. While nowadays chip based cards technology has made this task much more complex, it is still an approach widely used.
Some figures and trends:
Italy is placed second in Europe, after UK, as the quantity of fraud made with false or stolen ID, namely the identity theft.
Frauds based on the total or partial personification tend to rise in those countries where there is a widespread use of family’s credit. In Italy, this market segment is rapidly developing.
During the 2004, the UK has seen approx 120.00 pointed out cases of personification frauds (Source: CIFAS, antifraud English consortium that includes more than 240 different organizations coming from many different sectors).
At the same time all over Europe, during 2004, the credit card frauds ascribable to identity thefts have caused damages for more than 210 millions of dollars (Source: VISA).
Phishing is a kind of fraud where someone, using the identity of another person or of an institution, steals user’s personal data as credit cards’ numbers, passwords, bank account’s information, and so on. The most used brands for this kind of activities are eBay, PayPal, CityBank, and banks in general. With regard to Italy, during the 2005, Phishing has especially struck Banca Intesa, Fineco and Poste Italiane. According to some USA researches, about five percent of phishing mails addressees replies, that is: takes the bait. We don’t know if there are similar estimates about Italian users.
To show how candid could be any casual user, it’s interesting to recall the experiment, that was run in UK by InfoSecurity the last year. Interviewers were stopping people walking by, and proposed them to answer a set of questions from a written questionnaire; inside that questionnaire there were also several questions about personal data that may be very useful to recreate a password (mother’s maiden surname, birthday dates of the interviewee or of his relatives, pets’ names, and so on) or to discover his living address. Surprisingly, 92% of the interviewees has disclosed these sensitive details to the interviewers. (
http://digital-lifestyles.info/d ... usiness&id=2051)
Another na
