UK National Identity Fraud Prevention Week kicks off

Monday marks the first day of National Identity Fraud Prevention Week in the UK. The campaign's site, which claims that "Identity Fraud is one of the UK's fastest growing crimes", is a nationwide effort aimed at raising public awareness and fighting the battle against identify fraud.

The site includes a number of useful resources for both individuals and businesses: various facts about ID fraud, details of how fraud often occurs, prevention and what people can do if they suspect that they are victims of identity fraud. According to the site's facts page, identity fraud costs the UK economy over £1.2 billion each year and only 64 per cent of business have a clear policy on how to handle documents with sensitive information.

Last week, for example, more than 20,000 email account credentials were leaked online from various email services, including Yahoo, Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail. Most probably obtained by phishing, the exposed data included email addresses and account passwords. The information is often used to access other sites, such as PayPal and online banking accounts, as many users tend to use the same password for a variety of services.

National Identity Fraud Prevention Week is supported by a number of public and private organisations, such as Royal Mail, Equifax, Experian, the Metropolitan Police and the National Fraud Authority (NFA).

For updates and statistics on identity fraud, people can follow @Stop_IDfrauduk on Twitter. To keep up with the latest security news, check out The H Security, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow @honlinenews on Twitter.

See also:

• Up to 20,000+ Windows Live Hotmail account details leaked online, a report from The H.
• Report: Phishing and scareware on the rise, a report from The H.

(crve)