There are few things worse in life than waking up one day to find that your identity is not just your own, in fact, someone else has decided they want to be you as well. They have stolen your identity and intend to make the most of it, to your own detriment. The best defense against identity theft is to know what you can do to prevent it in the first place. You are never really, out of the woods, but you can take steps that will help you prevent and catch identity theft, if it were to occur.

One great way to start protecting yourself is with LifeLock. LifeLock is a revolutionary program that helps protect you, your name, and your social security number from identity thieves. How does this work? Well, essentially the program is designed to work with your credit report. We all know that when you (or someone pretending to be you) apply for any type of credit, the credit bureaus will be the first ones contacted to see where your credit currently stands. LifeLock contacts the credit bureaus and puts your information on "Fraud Alert". From then on, every ninety days, the program continues to do put your credit report on fraud alert.

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Millions of Americans have their identity stolen and this is only part of the crime.  These same Americans are victimized through numerous means of financial fraud.  The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) states that over 27 million citizens of this country were victims of identity theft in the last 5 years.  According to the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), the number of victims will increase by 500,000-700,000 each year.  Identity theft has increased by 79% from the year 2002 to 2003.

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Unlike the locked up laptop on the right, it is harder to prevent your email identity from being stolen. Email identity theft involves the fraudulent use of your email address for phishing or spamming. The usual victim of email identity theft is a commercial enterprise. Email identity theft is perpetrated for two purposes - to convince others that they are legitimate firms that have legitimate reasons for asking for people's financial information such as bank access, credit card numbers and so forth. This is phishing.

The second purpose behind email identity theft is for spamming. The most common of the ISPs and email providers have spam blockers. If, however, someone perpetrating email identity theft sends an email to an individual or firm under the guise of someone that person or firm knows the message will not be blocked.

Here are some tips on email identity theft prevention.

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Internet identity theft is a concern, or should be a concern for anyone who surfs the Internet or transacts business online. As more people become comfortable shopping online, the opportunity for internet identity theft increases. Every block that is established to protect a person’s identity, another breach is made enabling a dishonest person to steal their identity.

In some of the most prolific scams of internet identity theft involve someone simply being asked for their information and, as unfortunate as it may be, some people willingly provide the necessary information to allow someone to steal their identification. A name, social security number and an address is basically all that is needed to assume someone’s financial identity.

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Knowing how to protect yourself from identity theft should become standard procedure nowadays, especially for those who surf the Web. The Internet is fast becoming the number one way for thieves to steal your identity.

While there are no guarantees, here are some tips on how to protect yourself from identity theft.

The first may seem obvious - to do business with firms you know are reputable. But it's really not so easy in these days of phishing. It takes a little bit of research to find out if that Web site is the work of an identity thief or just less than cautious, less than savvy startup entrepreneur working out of her or his basement and not taking the security precautions you need to safeguard your identity.

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