PII: The Leading Cause Of Identity Theft

Personally Identifiable Information, commonly known as PII, is the leading cause of identity theft in the United States. In 2014, 12.7 million people in the United States were victims of identity fraud. Furthermore, from those 12.7 million people, there was an estimated $16 billion stolen from them (Pascual & Miller, 2015).These numbers are staggering and they do not even cover what stolen PII cost the government. In 2013 alone, the Internal Revenue Service reported that it paid out an estimated $5.2 billion in fraudulent identity theft refunds (IRS, 2014). Given these staggering numbers it is easy to understand why protecting PII is extremely important. However, to do this the average consumer needs to understand, what PII is, how PII is stolen,

Some examples of these techniques are dumpster diving, mail theft, personal item theft, over the shoulder surfing, social engineering and the stealing of personal items. Dumpster diving occurs when someone goes through another person’s trash looking for PII. To protect from this, people should shred all of their documents that contain PII before they throw it away. Mail theft is the theft of mail that could contain PII. To combat this, people need to monitor their mail and make sure that they are getting all of their mail. Shoulder surfing is when a thief gets close enough to you that he can see you enter a computer password, ATM pin, or the password to unlock your phone or computer. Shoulder surfing can happen at any time or location. To protect from this, people need to be cognizant of their surroundings at all times and not allow people to get close enough to them to see their passwords. Social engineering is ”the practice of someone either in person, over the telephone, or computer, uses means to deceive someone else into divulging sensitive information. Usually, social engineers know some information that lead the victim to believe they are legitimate and give the information asked (Rebovich, 2015). To prevent this, do not give out any personal information to anyone you do not know and verify the person is who they say they are (Rebovich,

Some technological schemes include, malware, spyware, viruses, trojan horses, phishing and many more. Malware, spyware, viruses, and trojan horses are malicious software designed to harm your computer, gather PII, or allow someone to remotely access your computer. To protect against these attacks people need use their computer, mobile phone and other internet capable devices wisely. They need to always have the most up to date anti-virus software available, do not open links they are not sure of, and only download programs from reputable websites. Phishing is when a thief tricks people into giving them their personal information. This can be done multiple different ways, over the phone, text, internet, social networks or even the mail. To protect against this, people need to be aware of what they post on the internet, check who is requesting information and verify that someone is who they are claiming to be (Rebovich, 2015). As stated earlier, even if people do everything to protect their PII it is not always safe, these schemes target businesses, corporations, and governments. So, unless these entities do everything right on their end, PII can still be stolen. Some examples of large data breaches include the Target breach of 2013 , Sony online entertainment breach of 2011 , and the Heartland Payment Systems breach of 2009 . In