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You don’t need to look very hard to find horror stories about Facebook identity theft. We already know how vulnverable your personal information can be, especially if it’s posted openly on your freely available profile page. It doesn’t take much for a poacher to put two and two together to get enough details (including your birthday) about you to use to apply for credit.
And it doesn’t even need to be a big credit purchase, or a fraudulent VISA or Mastercard. It’s fairly easy for a crook to assimilate your ID, and use it to rent movies from the video store, or sign out books from the library. While you might not be liable for anything charged against you or applied against your accounts, the inconvenience alone is enough to cause you a headache.
Again, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to lock your Facebook profile so that only “trusted” friends can view your details. Even better, only put limited information in your account at all, so that poaching fraudsters can’t obtain enough information about you to use to create bogus credit cards, credit accounts, and other forms of identity theft.
It’s like parking your car at the mall. You know the thieves are out there and that they’re going to break into someone’s vehicle. The key is to make your vehicle look less attractive to steal than the other vehicles. While it’s likely going to be impossible to prevent someone from stealing information through Facebook, if your information is difficult to find, then they’ll just look somewhere else.
