New Year's Apprehensions: Identity Theft Trends for 2020

The Types of Identity Theft You Need to Know About Now

Protecting yourself from privacy and identity threats can seem like a high-stakes game of Whack-a-Mole: you take steps to avoid one type of identity theft and a new, more menacing one (or many) seems to emerge. Trying to stop fraudsters is like trying to hit a moving target. And now in a new year and decade, you can be sure that a whole new crop of threats and scams are waiting to rear their ugly heads.

Still, it’s easiest to protect yourself when you’re well informed. So, here are some trends you can anticipate in the “whack-a-mole” world of identity theft:

• More and more, our phones are becoming our desktops, a new study predicts that cybercriminals will move more towards “smishing” (text-based phishing) attacks, to target us for identity theft and other scams.
• As we told you in our blog beware the IoT! Hackers now attack IoT devices an average of 5,233 times per month to spy on us, steal information, and commit other nefarious acts. Routers and connected cameras are the most common targets of IoT attacks.
• Criminals will continue to target children for identity theft, unwittingly abetted by adults who overshare about their offspring on social media.
• Experts also expect identity thieves will use widely available spoofing devices attached to drones to steal personal information from people using unsecured public Wi-Fi networks.
• Criminals will increasingly steal financial account credentials by e-skimming from mobile point-of-sale systems in event venues and other public places. In fact, e-skimming is even easier than credit card skimming because they don’t have to install a physical skimmer device and risk being detected.
• Account takeover fraud has grown exponentially over the past several years and will continue to grow, aided by criminal tactics like stealing your financial credentials via spoofer-equipped drones or mobile point-of-sale systems.

So, how can you whack these crimes before they pop up? Defense number one: passwords, passwords, passwords. Make ‘em long (preferably with a password manager), make ‘em strong, and change them often.

Second, if you keep only one New Year’s resolution in 2020, set up two-factor authentication plus alerts on every account that you can to help prevent account takeover fraud.

Third, consider getting privacy and identity protection, because no matter how careful you are, you can’t prevent data breaches or anticipate every new scam. And the threat is getting worse: in 2019 we saw an 80% increase in calls from our members reporting new scams and types of identity theft. With privacy and identity protection, you’ll have early warnings of identity trouble and, if a thief gets through your defenses, you have experts to help fix things for you.

From your friends at MyIDCare, Happy New Year and be secure out there!