After buying a cellular phone worth $100 dollars through a debit card, a receipt shows that some $2,000 dollars was missing from the buyer’s checking account. This scenario is very common most especially to college students. They are the most common victim of fraud because they spent more time online than other people.
Some of this fraud includes work-from-home jobs as well as buying textbooks at a radical discount that you couldn’t find elsewhere. Moreover, colleges add a problem as identification cards ably works as debit cards too.
Here are some tips on how to prevent identity theft as formulated by the Affinion Security Center, Intersections Inc. and Kroll Fraud Solutions:
- Never access emails, online banking accounts, or online medium of payments on a campus Wi-Fi hot spots. This isn’t always secure. As an alternative you have to use encryption to scramble communications over the network.
- Change passwords frequently. As an advice, you may change your password once every two months. If you use your laptop around campus, always take it with you to ensure that your hard drive isn’t compromised.
- Reveal only little information on social networking sites. Phone numbers, address, emails, mobile phones, parents name must be kept private.
- Don’t carry your Social Security number with you. If your college uses Social Security numbers for student IDs, request that the college generate a random number instead.
- If you shop online look for “https” in the URL. Check with sites’ privacy policies so you know what they may be doing with your personal information, or whether they’ve attached cookies to your computer, enabling them to track your viewing and usage patterns.
- If you use peer-to-peer file sharing programs, be sure to configure the files securely so personal information is not accessible to others.
Overall, taking extra precautions is important to students. Some of these internet crimes often involve wiring or sending money overseas and only to realize it was a scam.