A recent story on an Oklahoma news broadcast featured the story of a local woman who you might assume would be an unlikely identity theft victim.

The woman in question does not make purchases online, have a debit card or a car loan. Even still, a woman in Georgia was using her identity to apply for loans.

Since blaming the Internet for identity theft (or anything else) is one of my pet peeves, I wanted to say a few words about how identity thieves obtain their victim’s personal information.

Most people are very quick to blame the Internet, just like they love to do regarding pornography or bomb-making or whatever. The fact of the matter is that there are many ways identity thieves obtain the information they need to pull off their crimes.

Each and every time you hand your credit or debit card to a store clerk or restaurant server, you risk having your personal information stolen. It’s also easy for crooks to pluck your mail from your mailbox and we all know that all kinds of personal information is sent through the mail regularly.

Others are quite adept and breaking into automobiles where vehicle registration and insurance documents may be stolen. These days the crime may not end with the theft of your iPod or digital camera and the thief may also take whatever personal information is there for the taking and sell it to someone else or use it himself for the purposes of identity theft.

By the way, despite the fact that we hear about it a lot more these days, identity theft is not new. I recall an incident well over 20 years ago when a friend’s car was stolen. I cannot even remember if it was ever recovered, but what I do remember is that my friend got a nasty surprise one day when he was pulled over for speeding and ended up in the back of a police car in handcuffs.

The person that had stolen his car had decided to start using my friend’s identity and, not surprisingly, managed to get into trouble with the law and since he was using my friend’s identity, an arrest warrant was issued for my friend.

As you might imagine, the cops here stuff like “Honestly officer, I am not the guy you are looking for!” all the time, but eventually my friend was able to clear things up and was released.

It’s easy to blame the Internet or computers or whatever for identity theft but the reality is that there are many ways for identity thieves to get your personal information and all you can do is exercise a little common sense and take precautions like getting a good document shredder and shredding anything you throw out that has any personal information on it and generally being careful about who you share it with.

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