Identifying Five of The Most Common Types Of Identity Theft

Considering the most common forms of identity theft, most people usually only know of a few, and don’t often consider that something they’d never thought about could be used against them maliciously.  There are almost innumerable forms of identity theft that could occur, but most of them fall into the same five categories.  Those being:

1. Identity theft involving your Social Security Number
2. Financial identity theft
3. Medical identity theft
4. Criminal identity theft
5. State Photo Identification identity theft

The most common and widely known forms of id theft are Social Security Number theft, and State ID theft.  As both can be used against you fairly easily, and often times without you knowing.  Usually the theft occurs if you’ve lost your Social Security Card or State ID, or if either item has been stolen.  An identity thief will use the information contained therein to assume your identity to do any manner of things like apply for loans, or credit cards, or even jobs using your information.

Financial id theft concerns doing something fairly extreme, like an identity thief stealing your credit card number, filing a change of address card so that statements no longer come to your house, and then running up a huge bill.  The major problem here is that despite no liability claims from credit card companies, you only have a very limited amount of time to contest something on your bill.  And if you don’t contest it soon enough, there’s nothing you can do but pay off the debt to clear your credit.

Medical identity theft involves a person using your insurance information to put their hospital charges on your insurance plan, allowing them free healthcare while you float the bill.  Medical id theft is usually caused by the loss of an insurance card, or if your insurance card is stolen.

And Criminal identity theft, probably one of the scariest, is when an id thief actually assumes your identity to commit a crime, causing legal charges to be brought down upon you.  Meaning you could even end up in prison, or having warrants put out for your arrest that you don’t even know about.