Soldiers Vulnerable to Identity Theft

October 27, 2008 – 2:07 pm

Soldiers may be at a higher risk of identity theft then expected. In more recent years identity thieves have been targeting soldiers who are over seas. You might think that this makes an identity theft harder but in fact to does not. Soldiers that are over seas will not have the chance to read their credit report or see the other signs of an identity theft.
The army consistently uses a soldier’s social security number for identification. All their medical documentation will have the soldier’s social security number on it. After 20 plus years in the military you can imagine how much paperwork there is floating around with personal information on it.

A soldier can be taken advantage of just like anyone else through scams. Scams like Phishing, Pharming, misuse of P2P networks, change of address and of course theft.

Phishing is when a scammer tricks the victim into giving them the information they want by posing to be a legitimate company. One of the most popular examples is through bank systems. The Scammer sends out an email that tells them that they need to login to their bank account to do some task that they make up, something like answering some questions about their account. The thieves then will record the login information as the victim login to their fake system.

Identity thieves will also fill out a change of address form to get someone’s mail forwarded to a new location, typically a vacant house, in hopes that documents with personal information will be sent to the new address. Once they obtain the information they can go about stealing the identity of the unsuspecting victim.

The army has been taking steps to prevent identity theft from happening. The army has begun dropping the first five numbers of the social security number. They are also taking steps to move from a soldier’s social security number to an actual employee number. Steps like these will help prevent the identity theft from happen through the army. The soldiers still have to worry about other outside threats.

LifeLock can help protect you while you’re in the country or over seas fighting for freedom. You can get a discount on LifeLock when you use LifeLock Promotion code, Defense.

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