Wade Hodges
English 101
Kirk Greenwood
May 1st 2016
Who’s Asking?
I am writing as a small business owner that is speaking to entrepreneurs that range from the ages of college students to parents with children in seventh or eighth grade. This is my audience because these people pose as having the highest risk of identity theft. Another group that could benefit even though they do not know it, is small business owners and entrepreneurs.
As long as they are being used for the right purposes, cyber identities can actually be a very useful tool in the advancement of technology today. However, even the most advanced things can be manipulated into something dangerous and cyber identities is one of these things.. If you have a cyber identity, …show more content…
John was a business owner that fell victim to identity theft and is now an informational speaker on how to spot and protect you from thieves. In one of the pieces of the video towards the end, John speaks to a woman asking her very normal questions. He asks her name, asks her to hold his camera for a second, and poses for a picture with her for the cameraman on the side of the stage. He then reveals all the information he has gotten from her without her realizing. He has her photo, her name, and even her fingerprints off the screen of the camera. It seemed like a very normal conversation, but if he had been an identity thief, John would have a lot of information about this woman that he could use against her and it took only seconds to get it. With all the information he acquired in the short period of time John could go online and look this woman up and get all the rest of the information he might need by looking up if she has social media site accounts or other forms of information out online. But is it just adults that can be targeted by this? The answer is most certainly …show more content…
In this article there is a statistic that is truly terrifying. “A recent study based on identity scans of over 40,000 children in the U.S. conducted by Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Melon CyLab, found 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number. That figure is 51 times higher than the 0.2 percentrate for adults in the same population. Prior to the Internet age, child identity theft occurred most often at the hands of a relative who was using the minor’s Social Security number to circumvent bad credit.” (Elizabeth Alterman) Thieves are no longer just looking to circumvent bad credit, they are now looking to follow these children on social media sites to create a cyber identity that mimics the victims so that they can steal from them when the grow up. If one of the children became the owner of a small business in the future, the thief that has been following them would now have more than enough information to cause irreversible damage to the victim. And what is even worse, it would be difficult to prove that someone else was the one who did all of this because they would have had
English 101
Kirk Greenwood
May 1st 2016
Who’s Asking?
I am writing as a small business owner that is speaking to entrepreneurs that range from the ages of college students to parents with children in seventh or eighth grade. This is my audience because these people pose as having the highest risk of identity theft. Another group that could benefit even though they do not know it, is small business owners and entrepreneurs.
As long as they are being used for the right purposes, cyber identities can actually be a very useful tool in the advancement of technology today. However, even the most advanced things can be manipulated into something dangerous and cyber identities is one of these things.. If you have a cyber identity, …show more content…
John was a business owner that fell victim to identity theft and is now an informational speaker on how to spot and protect you from thieves. In one of the pieces of the video towards the end, John speaks to a woman asking her very normal questions. He asks her name, asks her to hold his camera for a second, and poses for a picture with her for the cameraman on the side of the stage. He then reveals all the information he has gotten from her without her realizing. He has her photo, her name, and even her fingerprints off the screen of the camera. It seemed like a very normal conversation, but if he had been an identity thief, John would have a lot of information about this woman that he could use against her and it took only seconds to get it. With all the information he acquired in the short period of time John could go online and look this woman up and get all the rest of the information he might need by looking up if she has social media site accounts or other forms of information out online. But is it just adults that can be targeted by this? The answer is most certainly …show more content…
In this article there is a statistic that is truly terrifying. “A recent study based on identity scans of over 40,000 children in the U.S. conducted by Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Melon CyLab, found 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number. That figure is 51 times higher than the 0.2 percentrate for adults in the same population. Prior to the Internet age, child identity theft occurred most often at the hands of a relative who was using the minor’s Social Security number to circumvent bad credit.” (Elizabeth Alterman) Thieves are no longer just looking to circumvent bad credit, they are now looking to follow these children on social media sites to create a cyber identity that mimics the victims so that they can steal from them when the grow up. If one of the children became the owner of a small business in the future, the thief that has been following them would now have more than enough information to cause irreversible damage to the victim. And what is even worse, it would be difficult to prove that someone else was the one who did all of this because they would have had