Lifelock: Identity Fraud in a Virtual World

This post brought to you by LifeLock Facebook. All opinions are 100% mine.

Before going to bed each night I have my own little ritual…I walk around the first floor of my house to make sure that each door and window is locked.  The last thing I want is to have someone break into my home while I am sleeping.

While having someone break into my home would be terrifying, I rarely give a thought to identity theft.  If you aren’t familiar with identity theft, it is when a strager or someone you know uses your personal information to commit fraud or other crimes.  This is detrimental to you because it negatively affects your credit report…not to mention it is a HUGE headache for you to take care of.  People can get your information in the following ways:

• Dumpster Diving
• Stollen Wallet
• P2P File Sharing
• Change of Address
• Mail Theft
• Phishing
• Shoulder Surfing
• SMSishing
• ATM Skimmers/Handheld Skimmers
• Vishing
• Overlays
• Online Shopping
• Data Breaches

Did you know that:

• Households earning $100K + per year have the highest identity theft rate at 7.4%
• The average cost per person of having identities stolen is $1513
• 11.6 million adults were victims of identity theft in 2011 and a total of $18 billion was lost

So how can we make sure identity theft doesn’t happen to us?  With Lifelock, they take a very proactive approach to make sure your identity is protected at all times.  After looking at the website, the first thing I noticed is that Lifelock provides services 24 hours a day; 7 days a week; 365 days a year.  The services they provide are:

• Proactive protection
• Advanced internet monitoring
• Credit alerts
• Non-Credit alerts
• Address monitoring
• Lost Wallet protection
• Credit Bureau reports

One thing I found interesting is if your password has 6 characters with NO symbol, it only takes  a professional hacker .000224 seconds to get your password.  a 10 character password and ONE symbol could take up to 20 days for that same professional hacker to unlock that password.  How hack friendly is your password?

Right now, almost everyone has a smartphone.  Check out these alarming stats about smartphone users:

• 6.6% victims are smartphone users
• 6.8% is social media users that have clicked on the applications
• 8.2% are smartphone users who have “checked in” using their smartphone app and GPS
• 10.1% of victims are Linkedin users

What are some ways that you protect yourself and your family from identity theft?  Be sure to check out LifeLock on Facebook for more details about Lifelock and how you can sign up.  Please leave me a comment either discussing identity theft or tell me your story about how your identity got stolen and what you did to fix it.