Fraudulent activities, such as identity theft can pose serious consequences to their victims, affecting their quality of life. Such cybercrimes take place when the attackers find access to your personal information, including name, credit card details, passwords, or home address. Its consequences may vary by the type of identity theft that happened to you. Some may leave you emotionally hurt, while others may take a toll on your credit, making it difficult to recover from the damage. So, if you are interested in knowing the repercussions of identity theft, then keep reading this article!
The Impact of Identity Theft
The purpose behind identity theft is to commit fraud by misusing a person’s name or other details. The victim may end up with a lack of privacy and security, which can be very frustrating for most people. Among its various negative consequences, we have shortlisted the most common ones that can disrupt your life in many ways:
Emotional Toll
When the victims become aware of the fraud committed while using their identity, it can invoke a lot of strong emotions, including anger and frustration in them. Knowing that someone was trying to ruin your reputation by impersonating you can take a toll on your emotional well-being. In fact, such stories may come up later in the future when you are planning to travel abroad or apply for a new job during a background check. In addition, such details can confuse the other party about the victim’s integrity, which can be a very daunting experience for many people. Besides, the victims may end up blaming themselves or their close ones for the troublesome situations they may experience.
If you or someone you know is experiencing such issues, call ADT customer service to protect your devices from cybercrimes.
No Access to Your Email Accounts
If your primary email account is secured with a weak password, it can be very easy to decipher for most hackers and intruders. For example, if your passwords contain your details, such as first or last name, date of birth, or contact number, anyone who knows your information may attempt to track your password and succeed at it.
Once your email account is under cybercriminals’ control, they will find more opportunities to exploit your information. On the other hand, if you have used the same password to secure every email and financial account, it may land you in hot waters as the criminals may easily access the rest of your accounts. Even if you have kept different passwords for each account, they still may become subject to such fraudulent acts, as intruders know various other techniques to access your password.
Apart from this, thieves may run a spam-as-a-service business to execute phishing attacks through spam emails. As a result, your account will most likely get banned upon spam detection.
Credit Card Issues
If the thieves find access to your credit card information, they may create more trouble for you in terms of finances. For instance, criminals may use your information to open a new account for committing fraud, such as putting you in huge financial debt by spending all the money from your account, which can destroy your credit score.
Stolen Medical Records
Your leaked information may contain your medical records, which can be sold on the Dark Web for thousands of dollars. This way, criminals may attempt a ransomware attack on your hospital’s healthcare database system, resulting in data breaches. This can show up as incorrect medical prescriptions or services, treatment plans, and even misdiagnosis if the thieves modify their victims’ medical history.
Hacked Social Media Accounts
Apart from your email accounts, your social media accounts need to be just as secure as any other account. It is always a good idea to use strong passwords that contain at least 8 alphanumeric characters to ensure maximum protection against hackers. However, if you don’t take precautionary measures to secure your social media accounts, cybercriminals may try to gain access by authenticating with third-party apps, such as Facebook, Google, and even Twitter. Once they have your data, including private messages, personal information, and passwords, they can use it to tarnish your image or even leak your information to the public.
To ensure that your personal information remains private, ADT Security offers various benefits for its users to maintain their privacy at all costs.
Final Thoughts
With an online presence, protecting your identity is necessary, as it can save you from a lot of trouble in the future. Ensure that you use strong passwords to secure your accounts. Besides, activating multi-factor authentication is a great way to restrict unauthorized users from accessing your accounts. Investing in a smart security service comes with an added advantage that enables users to monitor their IoT devices at home and on the go. In addition, it can easily integrate with your home automation system so that you could limit the access of hackers and intruders through your network.