Identity Theft
Identity theft occurs when another person uses your personal information without your consent to commit fraud or other crimes. Typical crimes include stealing money from your bank account, opening lines of credit under your name and applying for fraudulent loans. These crimes, as well as many others, can damage your credit, leave you responsibile for bills, and cause you countless hours of frustration. To minimize the risk of identity theft, please learn more at the Federal Trade Commision web site.

Phishing Scams
Phishing is very popular. This type of deception is designed to steal your identity by getting you to disclose valuable personal data — like bank account information, credit card numbers, passwords, account data, or other information — by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication like email. These emails can look quite convincing, with company logos and banners copied from actual web sites. Often, they will tell you that their security procedure has changed or that they need to update (or validate) your information, and then direct you to a look-alike web site. Never respond to these types of emails. You can either forward them to the institution that they are mimicking or delete them. Learn more about phishing.

Pharming Scams
Pharming is when scam artists redirect Internet traffic from one web site to a different, identical-looking site in order to trick you into entering your user name and password into the database on their fake site. Banking and financial sites are often the target of these attacks, in which scam artist try to acquire your personal information in order to access your bank account, steal your identity, or commit other kinds of fraud in your name.

The use of fake web sites may make pharming sound similar to email phishing scams, but pharming is more insidious, since you can be redirected to a false site without any participation or knowledge on your part.

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