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What is Corporate Identity Theft?Corporate identity theft is a larger form of identity theft, by smart, opportunistic criminals. This form of identity theft resembles individual identity theft in that criminals can attack businesses and corporations in the same way they steal personal information from unsuspecting people. The most common form of identity theft is when criminals obtain a credit card in the name of another individual. This is also a common scenario with corporate identity theft. If there is a "typical" scenario of corporate, or business identity theft it would go something like this... A criminal will set up a merchant account in the name of a business that typically does not already accept or need to accept credit card payments. The criminals then take stolen credit cards and make charges on these cards to the merchant account. Then the credit card companies send these funds to the processors who then send the money to accounts held by the criminals. This is obviously a more elaborate approach to idenitty theft. However, for a savvy criminal it is a better way of making money because it is on a larger scale than indivdual identity theft and also difficult to trace. Two things stand out to me when I hear about these cases. First, the thieves have access to many credit cards. How do they get access to these cards on such a large scale? And second, why doesn't the merchant accout check the legitiimacy of the business purchasing the merchant account? I read one case where the thieves used a stolen identity of an unsuspecting man as the "president" of the company. Why wouldn't the merchant account provider look into this person's history in more detail? This is an example of corporate identity theft on a large scale, not uncommon for a sophisticated criminal. Even though it takes a more motivated and crafty criminal to do this sort of thing, your business is still vulnerable to other, less sophisticated forms of idenitty theft. Criminals may attempt to hack into your website, phish for your business's banking information, create false websites using domain names similar to that of your business, dumpster dive for important information on your business, and even your own employees can steal vital information. Protecting your business is similar to the steps it takes to protect yourself.
For a more detailed guide to corporate identity theft protection, you may want to consider consulting with experts such as
Kroll Identity Fraud Solutions.
Although I'd love to give you
more information on this topic, I'll leave it to the experts. Kroll is an expert in risk management for both businesses and individuals and can provide you with the information you're
looking for on business identity theft prevention and restoration.
13 simple ways to prevent identity theft
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