INDIANAPOLIS — As it turns out, online crooks don’t need to steal your whole identity to commit fraud; they can simply steal a piece of it.
Synthetic Identity Theft is the fastest growing form of ID theft, and according to the Federal Trade Commission, it’s increased by more than 200% in the last five years, accounting for about 85% of all ID theft cases.
It happens when a crook takes information from several different sources to create a new identity. They might take your social security number from a data breach and combine it with the name, address, and phone number of other people to invent a whole new identity. Instead of posing as you, they create a whole new persona to take out loans, make purchases and other things. They often use the leaked information of children in their schemes, taking advantage of the “blank slate” credit score associated with them.
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