Vigilance and a hammer needed to avoid identity theft

by Gill Montia

Story link: Vigilance and a hammer needed to avoid identity theft

Which? is advising people who are disposing of old computers to smash the hard drives before taking a trip to the tip or selling-on their old equipment.

Deleting files or reformatting a hard drive does not offer protection against identity theft and criminals are trawling household waste amenities and Internet auction sites to get their hands on personal data.

The consumer group says it bought eight second-hand hard drives on eBay and used free software downloaded from the Internet to recover 22,000 “deleted” files, including image and music files and spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, UK payments provider body, Apacs, is urging consumers to take care with their credit card details, both when in the UK and when overseas.

The association has reported a 40% rise in losses from of all types of plastic card fraud between January and June 2008.

Apparently, fraudsters are obtaining the details of UK cardholders and using them in countries that do not yet have chip-and-pin technology.

Banks throughout Europe have agreed to bring in chip-and-pin cards by 2010; in the meantime, criminals are wasting no time.