Identity theft is a huge criminal business online. Crooks obtain your personal information and use it to gain access to your bank accounts, your online shopping accounts, or they setup new credit cards using your name.

You may think that it could not happen to you but it can happen without you ever knowing until it is too late and the collection agency or worse, the police are pounding on your door.

You may mistakenly think that identity theft results from hackers breaking into computers. Actually, hacking into a company computer to obtain useful information is very rare. It is extremely difficult to hack into a computer. It requires a great deal of specialized knowledge and it takes a lot of time. Professional criminals do not waste their time on scams that are difficult or have no guaranteed results. Professional criminals will go after victims directly. They know they can obtain personal information from you much more easily than hacking a computer database.

Criminals have devised a number of methods to steal your information, but they all come down to basic psychology. The criminals setup elaborate trips to trick you into giving up your information freely and willingly. They send out millions of phishing emails. These emails are Fishing for information. The emails may offer fake jobs, they may appear to be from legitimate companies, companies you trust.

You may have received an email that appeared to be from your bank, PayPal, eBay, Amazon.com, or any other name you know and trust. Criminals can easily make fake look-alike emails that look exactly like the real company emails. These fake emails then lead you to a spoof website which looks and works exactly like the real website but there is one major difference! This spoof site is run by a criminal.

When you type in your bank password, your PayPal password, your eBay password, or any other information, you are giving it to a criminal. The criminal will then log into your PayPal account or bank account and transfer out as much money as they can, then use your account to scam other people. They will login to your eBay account and sell expensive items, collect the money and disappear leaving you holding the bag and trying to explain to detectives why they should not arrest you.

The old advice about checking for your real name in the email or verifying the email address in these phishing messages no longer works. More industrious criminals are now using eBay and other sites to collect basic information like your name and email address and sending customized phishing emails which sometimes look more convincing than the real emails.

Some websites only want to obtain your name and phone number. They will then have criminal associates call you and offer loans, claim you have won a contest, ask for a donation to charity, claim they are with the police or a major company, or anything else they think will trick you into giving them your credit card number or personal information by phone. Even if you are very careful online, these scammers can sound very convincing and even fake Caller ID information to make themselves look legitimate. They collect only basic information online and go for the real illegal payoff by phone or mail.

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