To avoid Identity theft on the internet; you should properly use and manage all your internet accounts

Your e-mail accounts, instant messaging service accounts and social networking profiles should be managed properly. This is because criminals are always looking for ways to steal important information from them. You should avoid revealing so much about yourself on your social networking profiles, chat rooms and instant messaging service accounts. Hence, you should not post your usernames and passwords, bank account details, personal Identification and credit card numbers, birth date and your mother’s maiden name on chat rooms, your social networking profiles and instant messaging service accounts. Some criminals could use the information you provide on those platforms, to defraud you, or to damage your reputation.

It is also important you verify the identity of friends you make on social networking profiles, before you attempt meeting them for the first time. And if you must meet them, it must be in a public location, and you should be accompanied by someone you trust. But, you should not in any condition accept meeting them in hotels, private residence, or locations you know nothing about. It could be risky and dangerous if you do so.

You should control how other people would view your information on social networking sites, through the privacy settings in your profiles. With the privacy settings, you can determine what information your friends and the rest of the pubic could see. In fact, with the proper adjustment of the privacy settings, some of your information can only be seen by your friends.

However, you should still be aware that even if your information is only seen by your friends, it is also possible that the rest of the public could see them. This is because your friends could decide to copy and paste the information where the rest of the public could access them. And you should also not forget the fact, that your friend today could be your ex-friend tomorrow. Therefore, you should only share the information that you wouldn't mind, if your parents and others close to you see them.

Similarly, you should not post your financial information, such as your debit and credit card numbers, and bank account details on your social networking profiles. Some criminals would always search for such information on social networking profiles, in order to harvest them for fraudulent activities.

You should avoid sending your financial details and other sensitive information, through your e-mail accounts except the accounts are encrypted. The messages you send through un-encrypted e-mail accounts could be read and modified by other people, without your knowledge and permission.

You should avoid visiting websites through shortened universal resource locators, and links that are embedded in your e-mail messages, social networking profiles and instant messaging service accounts. Such Universal Resource Locators and links could install viruses and other malicious programs in your system, or they could even re-direct your web browsers to fake sites without your knowledge.

You should always install the up-to-date version of your e-mail accounts and instant messaging service software. The new versions would always come with higher security than the previous ones. And the previous ones could be vulnerable on the internet.

You should allow only trusted and secure third party applications run in your social networking profiles, in order not to expose your profiles to suspicious and malicious applications. And you should reject to re-enter your password any time you are automatically logged out from your social networking profile; either because of a video clip you are accessing, or a link you clicked in your profile.

You should always delete e-mail attachments from people you don’t know; and you should scan the expected attachments with anti-virus programs before you open them. This would protect you from viruses that are sent through the internet as e-mail attachments.

And whenever you receive unexpected e-mail attachments from people you know and trust, you should first confirm from them before you open and read the attachments. This would also protect you from malicious programs, such as worms that transmit themselves on the internet as e-mail attachments.

You should not respond to e-mail messages, tweets or posts that would ask you for account update or verification through links; even if it is sent by your bank or any organization you have account with. You should not panic, even if the senders threaten to terminate your accounts, if you don’t respond within a specified time stated in the message.

You should be totally aware, that such messages are usually sent by criminals; and the threat of account termination, is just their strategy to make you respond immediately. And the so called verification links you are asked to follow, would only take you to a duplicate website, where the information you enter would go directly to the criminals that built the website. In fact, this attack is known as phishing attack in the internet world; and the actual purpose of this type of attack is to harvest your username and password, your personal identifying information and financial details for identity theft.

Identity theft occurs when a criminal or even someone close to you, uses your personal identifying information such as your names, home and office address, day of birth and identity card numbers, to impersonate you on the internet without your knowledge. The criminals or the identity thieves could use your identity to steal what belongs to you on the internet, or they could use the identity to damage your reputation and to attack others on the internet. And the only time you could discover such attack, is when you notice unusual activities in your accounts, or when you are wanted for crimes you never committed.

Therefore, anytime you receive such verification messages, you should delete them without responding. But in case you feel they are genuine, you should first contact your bank or the organization that sent the message through their official website. However, you must type the real website name of the organization, on the browser address bar yourself, instead of following the links or coping and pasting them on the browser address bar.

You should avoid opening e-mail messages with double file extensions and the ones with executable file extensions. Most criminals use double file extensions to hide executable file extensions in e-mails messages. And e-mail messages with executable file extensions would likely contain virus.  

You should always search the internet to know what others have written about you. Some of your old friends or perceived enemies could use the internet to trash your reputation. Therefore, if you see any negative information about yourself on a website, you should inform the website administrators through their e-mail accounts. And if that doesn't solve the problem, you can contact other relevant authorities. And in order to attend to such problems immediately they occur, it is important you set up Google alert, so you can always receive e-mail updates whenever anything related to your name is posted on the internet.

You should delete spam messages from your e-mail accounts without reading them. But before you delete them, you should first check for legitimate massages in your spam folder. Some legitimate e-mail messages could be sent to the spam folder by your e-mail providers, and also as a result of your filter settings.

You should also not forget to report suspicious and fraudulent messages to your e-mail providers. When you report a message as fraudulent, the sender would be blacklisted in your e-mail account. Hence, you would never receive messages from such sender in the future, except he or she uses another e-mail account

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You should also add another layer of security in your accounts by activating the two-factor authentication provided in most online accounts. When you activate the two-factor authentication; your accounts can only be accessed with a password and a secret code that would be sent to your phone on every log-in. And what that means is that even if someone steals your password, such a person can’t log-in to your account, except he or she also steals your phone.

Finally, you should read most of your e-mail messages in plain text instead of hypertext mark-up language. Reading e-mail messages in plain text would prevent hidden images such as beacons, and other active contents from loading into your system, without your knowledge.