Id theft

Identity theft is a form of fraud or cheating of another person's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, normally it’s used to access resources orobtain credit and other benefits in that person's name.
There are cases of identity cloning to attack payment systems, including online credit card processing and medical insurance.

Identity theftis divided in different categories:

Criminal identity theft
When a criminal fraudulently identifies himself to police as another individual at the point of arrest. In some cases criminals havepreviously obtained state-issued identity documents using credentials stolen from others, or have presented fake ID. Charges may be placed under the victim's name, letting the criminal off the hook.Victims might only learn of such incidents by chance, for example by receiving court summons, discovering their driver’s licenses are, or through background checks.

Medical identity theft
Medicalidentity theft occurs when someone uses a person's name and other information about them without the person's consent to obtain medical services or goods.

* Business/commercial identity theft:using another's business name to obtain credit.
* Financial identity theft: using another's identity to obtain credit, goods and services
* Identity cloning: using another's information to assumehis or her identity in daily life.

Techniques for obtaining and exploiting personal information for identity theft

· Going through personal information of others.
· Retrieving personal datafrom some equipment and storage media including computers, mobile phones, USB memory sticks and hard drives that have been disposed of carelessly at public dump sites, given away or sold on withouthaving been erased.
· Stealing bank or credit cards, identification cards, passports, authentication tokens ... typically by pickpocketing, housebreaking or mail theft.
· Creating clone cards
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