Online fraud is one of the growing concerns across the UK and the rest of the world, and organised criminals are consistently stealing identities of others and have been using it for illegal purposes such as credit card fraud, impersonation, money laundering etc.
These criminals have moved onto targeting social networking site such as Facebook / MySpace and trawling for personal profiles containing vital information such as Full Name, D.O.B, Address, Phone Numbers etc. This will enable them to use the data collected and pretend to be someone else, the victim; or it can also be used for marketing scams.
Most internet users have anti virus and firewall protecting their personal computers, but many fail to realise the risks of publishing personal information on social network sites, according to fool.co.uk as many as one in three Facebook and MySpace users are virtually giving away their personal ID which will make them vulnerable for identity theft.
£30.2bn was spent online during 2006 (IMRG, January 2007) and 19.7 Million people are shopping online in the UK and spending an average of £652 each in the last six months (BMRB, Feb 2007) so criminals have moved onto the online word to target people where the big money lies.
There are a few methods to protect you from Social Networking sites…
- You should only post information on these sites that you would be happy to give a complete stranger at a bus stop.
- You can restrict the people who can view your profile, i.e. people in your friends’ list.
