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What are the most common things thieves steal? The number one thing that should be protected is your Social Security number

The Most Common Things Thieves Steal

In order to protect yourself you must know what identity thieves steal. When you know what is most common on their list you will know what you need to protect the most. The following is a list of what they like to steal, as well as how they like to refer to the actual theft. Identity theft protections benefits by being able to place yourself in the mind of a thief.

What Do ID Thieves Steal?

The number one thing that should be protected is your Social Security number. This is a number that can hold the key to a lot of your sensitive information. If a thief gets a hold of this, then they can do some real damage to your personal accounts. Knowing this number can help them open up new accounts under your name that you may not even know about. Then they can run your credit dry and not have to worry about anything that may happen afterwards because it will all come back to you.

Thieves will also look for any log in information that you might have. This could be PIN numbers, email account, and online accounts (such as eBay). The more access to your life they can get a hold of the more damage they can do to you. Make sure you do not access any personal log in information in settings you are not familiar with, with people you are not familiar with near by. It is important to keep your Social Security number protected because it handles so much of your finances, but this does not mean you should relax on protecting your smaller information such as passwords. This is also a key part of Identity Theft Protections.

How Thieves Handle This Process

We have already covered how you can protect yourself from identity fraud, so the following might just be a refresher. Here are some of the ways identity theft is handled and what it is referred to as.

  • When you hear of somebody going phising this means that they will try to send you junk emails or junk mail and act like they are someone else. They try to trick you into revealing your personal information.
  • Skimming is when there is a special device that can remember your credit card number and use it for later purposes. This is why you should not swipe your credit card in any unauthorized location.
  • When thieves contact you and pretend to be a financially related company or the government, then this is called false pretexts. They are pretending to be someone else over the phone, and try to catch you off guard. They can also do this to the financial institutions themselves. They can call up pretending to be you in order to get your information.