Sunday, August 15, 2010

ID theft warning

It really makes me feel sad how a few bad people can take something that's meant to be fun and turn it into someting that can help perpetuate a crime.

I recently started filling out my family tree on Ancestry.com (a legitimate site), thinking it would be fun to see how far I could go back, or that maybe sometime in the future other members of my family could use it to look up their family history.

Then tonight I was watching a Dateline show about identity thieves. They said that after someone steals your credit card number, they sometimes go to the Ancestry site and see if you are listed on it. Then they look up your mother's maiden name so that they can answer the ID questions from your credit card company. Not that anybody would want to steal my crappy credit history, but I immediately went to Ancestry and took that piece of information off my family tree, just in case.

I had never even thought about that. Just another reminder, I guess, in this "information age" to be very careful about what information you are putting out there about yourself.

Stupid criminals. They ruin things for everybody.

Cat

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