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Why Is Identity Theft A Growing Crime In Today's Society?

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Why is identity theft a growing crime in today’s society? Compared to the start of the 1900s; currently it is difficult to find someone who does not utilize technology in their day to day life. Using technology, especially the internet has become a necessity for everyone. But because of the rising need, people do not realize the dangers associated with technology. Therefore, due to the inevitability of someone needing to use technology, criminals had been able to find targets that are easy to exploit and steal personal identifiable information from to commit identity theft. Some of the issues that should be considered when thinking about identity theft are; how the crime could happen, what kind of impact it makes and what can be done to protect …show more content…

Identity theft is one of the growing crimes in the United States due to the fact people do not know how to properly protect themselves against it. Criminals use different methods to acquire the information necessary to steal someone’s identity. Some of the techniques used to commit identity theft are; stealing wallets, acquiring bank information or pilfering through trash to find documents containing PII (FBI, n.d.). Nowadays criminals are able to steal people’s identity using different procedures over the internet without having to compromise their identity. Some of the methods are social engineering, phishing, sending spam messages and malware (OLI, 2013). Criminals use these methods because with the use of technology, identity theft could be accomplished anonymously and without much effort. Also because people lower their guard about securing their personally identifiable information when using the internet, especially when using social networks, they become easy targets to

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