The Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego recently announced the findings of a study it conducted into how worried consumers are about the security of online transactions. Here are some of their findings:

• 87% of respondents expressed significant concern about having their credit card information stolen or having merchants lose personal and financial information in a data breach.

• 81% of respondents cited phishing emails as a significant concern.

• 80% of respondents expressed significant concern over having their passwords stolen.

• 77% of respondents were concerned about receiving SPAM emails.

The study went on to ask consumers what steps they take to protect themselves:

• 51% always check the URL of links they receive in email before clicking.

• 41% refuse to use payment methods that allow access to their bank accounts.

• 35% regularly change passwords.

What does that tell you? Well it seems to indicate that most consumers “get it” or at least part of it – that there are serious and constant risks online, and they should be worried.

But it also indicates that most of those who “get it” don’t get it enough. If only a third of respondents follow the simplest, most basic, and most important rule of all – regularly changing a password – then it looks like we still have a long way to go.

Most consumers I work with are still doing very little to protect themselves. They rarely check their credit reports, change their passwords, scan their computers for malware or talk to their kids about online risks.

Guarding your identity is the same as guarding your health. Rather than an occasional interruption to a busy life, it should be a natural and instinctive part of everyday living. Be healthy, and be safe.

ITRC Study: Loss of Credit Card Information and Merchant Data Breach Cited As Priority Concerns To Consumers

I recently read a report that that digital camera will soon be a thing of the past, because soon a camera will be a standard feature in most cell phones – if we’re not already there.

And while that’s great news for people who like the convenience of always having a camera in their pocket, it doesn’t come without risks. And one of the growing risks your kids may face is what’s being dubbed by the media as “sextortion.”

Kids will often do risky things with their phones (like texting while driving), and when you add a camera to the mix kids may be tempted to go one step further and use that camera to snap and share inappropriate photos of themselves.

Online predators are only waiting to take advantage of that, and friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers are using compromising photos of teens to bully them into sharing even more explicit images. Or in some cases, blackmailing them into performing sex acts – all under that threat that if they don’t, the predator will tell their parents or publish the photos.

In a recent case, an 18-year-old man was sentenced to fifteen years in prison after posing as a girl on Facebook, encouraging other young men to send him compromising photos of themselves, and then blackmailing them into having sex with him.

And while many kids think that social networking sites like Facebook might be a safe place to store and share these images with a small circle of friends, hackers can still get access to these images and use them to cajole or threaten kids into doing things they shouldn’t.

Lessons learned?

• The best way to address all the online threats that face your kids is to talk to them – honestly, open, and often. In the end, the best defense is your child’s own judgment.

Teens and Sextortion: Young Girls Blackmailed into Porn

Maybe you’ve seen the ads too – web sites that look like real news sites speaking great things about a work-at-home program that can net you thousands of dollars a month doing very little and knowing very little.

Sounds like an obvious scam, but wait. It’s got a real news anchor claiming it’s the real deal, as they interview a real consumer, in your neighborhood, who claims that this very program changed their lives. And to top it all, there’s a banner across the top of the page that says “As seen on MSNBC, CNN, CBS” etc.

The web site looks so legitimate it’s very easy to get suckered. And sucker is the word. Many of these sites are nothing more than an attempt to sell you a useless guide to a very questionable money-making secret that probably won’t make you a dime.

Others are outright frauds, and a well-designed attempt to part you from either your personal information or you money.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) recently assembled a great list of the ten ways to spot these work-at-home scams, and here are just some of their useful tips:

• Watch out if they promise to pay you a lot of money for jobs that don’t seem to require much effort or skill.

• Be wary of requests to pay for something upfront, and especially by wire transfer.

• Be cautious if they don’t put anything in writing or don’t offer you a contract.

• A lack of hard information, like company background and physical address, should be a red flag too.

10 Ways to Spot Work at Home Scams

Security experts recently uncovered a new and very sinister twist on identity theft – businesses actively selling the Social Security numbers of children to buyers with less-than-stellar credit, who dump the stolen identities as soon as they’re no longer of use, then purchase more.

Sounds crazy, but it does seem to be increasing in popularly, and a number of businesses have sprung up recently operating a black market in what they artfully describe as credit privacy numbers, or cpn’s.

They’re being packaged and sold as a way for consumers who have seen their credit scores hurt in the recent recession bump up those scores by starting over with a new and clean score. But they’re much more likely to be used by fraudsters who run up massive debts using the compromised identity, then move on to the next identity as soon as the previous one has been red flagged.

It sounds like a very straightforward case of fraud or identity theft but even authorities admit that they’re having a hard time proving this is a crime because the businesses involved are not offering Social Security numbers for sale. At least not technically.

The thieves use data collection and web crawling software to harvest the Social Security numbers of kids from web sites across the world. Seems hard to imagine but Social Security numbers can still be easily found on many web sites, often as a result of either mistakes or just lax security by businesses and government agencies entrusted with those numbers.

Once the numbers are found they’re then verified as “clean” – meaning they don’t yet have credit reports connected to them – and sometimes packaged with other personal information before being sold on the black market, on sites like Craigslist, or even in the open on corporate web sites.

And why kids’ Social Security numbers? These numbers are considered “clean” or “golden” because they’re unused and therefore provide the new user with a clean credit slate to start over, and because the rightful owners of these numbers (the kids) don’t check their credit reports and won’t find out until years later.

Just how easy is it to get your own CPN? It took me less than sixty seconds of surfing to find a web site offering to sell me a “CPN Package” that included a new Social Security number, a kit explaining how to use it to “restore my credit,” and a new credit card with a $500 limit – all for just $300.

Lessons learned:

• Check with the credit bureaus to make sure they don’t have any kind of credit file connected to your kids’ Social Security numbers.

• Don’t forget to check your own credit reports. If you have a good history and a clean report, thieves will buy that too.

New ID theft targets kids’ Social Security numbers

The FBI recently warned of a spike in a scam where crooks pose as a real Facebook user and contact all that user’s friends with a convincing plea for money. The story often involves travel to a foreign land, where the fake victim claims they have been robbed at gunpoint, their wallet or purse gone (along with money, credit cards and passports) and they desperately need their friends to wire them enough money to make it home safely.

And the crooks can get even more brazen and creative. In one case, a crook actually called his victim’s grandmother, and, claiming his voice was different because he was sick, persuaded grandma to send him some money to help bail him out from a gambling debt.

Apparently the crook had used freely available information on the victim’s Facebook page to learn more about the victim, his background and his family, to create a clone convincing enough for grandma to fall for.

The NBC affiliate in Los Angeles recently told the story of how a hacker broke into a user’s Yahoo! account, stole a photo of the individual and then used it to create a fake Facebook page. The crook also used the victim’s Yahoo! address book to contact all the victim’s friends with a convincing story about how the victim and her family had been robbed in London and needed some money sent to them so they could get home.

Lessons learned?

• If you’re not used to your friends or acquaintances asking you for money, especially in unusual circumstances, from unusual places, or for unusual reasons, take the risk of fracturing the friendship and just say no. If you’re still not sure, find some other way to determine if the friend really is travelling or doing whatever else it is they’re claiming.

• Keep to a minimum the information you post on any social networking site, and be especially careful about posting family stories, history, photos, and names.

• Change your passwords often, especially your email and Facebook passwords, and make them as hard to crack or guess as possible.

“Help, I am stranded!” scam haunting social networks