This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
My first credit card was an AT&T Universal card that I received after filling out an application outside of Doherty Hall on the campus of the esteemed Carnegie Mellon University. I applied because the guy was giving away T-shirts with funny slogans, and I thought it was a great way to get a funny T-shirt, right?
Luckily for me, the whole setup was 100 percent legitimate, since it’s now been eight years and my identity wasn’t stolen. But how many of those similarly set up operations aren’t legitimate? It’s a fantastic way to capture a ton of information in a short period of time from unsuspecting victims who likely aren’t even aware that identity theft happens.
Let’s say that the person accepting applications is entirely legitimate and he personally won’t run off with your information. What’s to say someone doesn’t mug him on his way home or break into his car and steal all that information? If you think of all the recent data breaches involving theft of credit card numbers, the thieves didn’t break into the store or credit card company databases, they broke into the processors’ databases.
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