- ISBN13: 9780767925860
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The charismatic forger immortalized in the film Catch Me If You Can exposes the astonishing tactics of today’s identity theft criminals and offers powerful strategies to thwart them based on his second career as an acclaimed fraud-fighting consultant.
Consider these sobering facts:
*Six out of ten American companies and government agencies have already been hacked.
*An estimated 80 percent of birth certificate requests are fulfilled through the mail for people using only a name and a return address. So I could take your name and use my address, and get your birth certificate. From there I’m off to the races.
*Americans write 39 billion c… More >>
Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan
I learned so much about what I should and should NOT be doing to safeguard my identity. I highly recommend it!
Rating: 5 / 5
Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan
If you are absolutely new to idea of identity theft, it’s a buy. If you’ve ever been a victim or are generally self-aware, it’s a pass. Stealing Your Life is a good guide to preventing identity theft. Considering that a fresh victim is hit every four seconds, this book offers important tips and techniques from an unsurpassed authority on the latest identity theft schemes. Abagnale explains what criminals do and what steps you should take to protect yourself. Several anecdotes of creative criminality are included, which are as entertaining as they are enlightening. This book provides clear, practical ways to protect yourself from one of today’s most common crimes – BUT none of the methods described are fool-proof, and what is worse, it is unlikely that you have not heard at least 80% of this information before.
Rating: 3 / 5
Got this book from the library, read it and then ordered copies for each of my three grown kids. It’s a little scarey at the beginning, makes you wanna crawl in a hole and avoid the world. However, it does give a number of good ideas on ways to protect your indentity later in the book. Enjoy
Rating: 4 / 5
A good book overall to be aware of how identity theft occurs and steps to prevent it from happening to you.
I was familiar with most of the tactics identity thieves use, such as the scam emails telling you that millions of dollars will be transferred to your account (I’ve gotten tons of those emails). Other methods used by identity thieves were unfamiliar to me, such as taking your personal information during supposedly public surveys.
I did find the author a bit repetitious, and felt this book could have been written in a fewer pages. The author does however get his point across, and not only will you be scared, but you will also be encouraged to start taking precautions against identity thieves. You will also wonder whether you are already the victim of an identity thief.
I did find it surprising that most identity thieves are close friends or relatives! This bit came to me as a shocker, and the author gives many real life cases of how children stole the identity of their own parents, or vice-versa. You can really never trust anyone.
I did find it annoying when the author promoted his shredder. I think this could have been discussed in an index, but not within the book itself. This somehow made me take the book less seriously, even though the author is a former counterfeiter and an FBI instructor on identity theft and counterfeits.
This book is a must read for anyone wishing to identify identity theft and learn of ways to prevent it from happening in the first place (like shredding all your documents using the author’s patented shredder hihihihihihihi).
The book could have been shorter and more captivating, and I did find myself skipping pages and skimming over others.
Rating: 3 / 5
I think this should be required reading for all of us. Some of it is just common sense, but we all make common sense mistakes when we get complacent. If nothing else, the chapter with the “21 tips” says it all.
Rating: 3 / 5