How Scammers Use Your Personal Information
I started researching my next book for I Was Scammed, a follow-up to The Big Con which was recently published and will be a film. Here are highlights from the next chapter on how scammers use your personal identity, including for credit card fraud.
How the Scammers Use Your Personal Information
Once the identity thieves have stolen your personal information, there are all kinds of ways they can use it both to scam you or to scam other people. And making the scam even worse, is these criminals are hard to track down, because they can be anywhere, and often engage in these scams from another country. As a result, even if you can act quickly enough to reverse or reduce any losses and even if law enforcement can identify the criminals, it is difficult to take any legal or criminal action because they are far away — and once caught, they can easily move somewhere else and change their name, so they are ready to defraud someone else.
There are seven basic types of fraud:
· Credit card fraud
· Bank and finance fraud
· Government documents fraud
· Obtaining products and services in your name
· Gaining other benefits by claiming to be you
· Engaging in criminal activities in your name
· Convincing you to send money or take other actions because they know who you are
· Accessing your email or social media accounts to obtain even more sensitive information or scam others
And you might think of still other ways they can scam you or others. In fact, once the scammers have your personal information, they can try to scam you repeatedly by multiple scams.
Credit Card Fraud
These credit card fraud scams include the following:
· The scammers may open up new credit card accounts in your name. Then, before you report the theft, usually after you discover the spurious charges, they may use the new card accounts to make purchases. But then after they don’t pay their bills, the delinquent accounts will appear on your credit report.
· The scammers may change the billing address on your current credit cards, so you don’t receive the bills and don’t realize there is a problem. Meanwhile, they can run up charges on our account and not pay them, until you wonder about your missing bills and discover why you haven’t been getting them.
· The scammers may open up a new phone or wireless account in your name or charge calls on your existing account.
· The scammers may get utility services like electricity, heating, or cable TV by using your name and credit card information.