One of the biggest hurdles for a criminal committing identity theft is obtaining credit card numbers to commit fraud with. However, Unfortunately, this is not really all that difficult to do. Once obtained, criminals can use these numbers to clone the credit card, which is basically making an identical copy, or they can just use it to commit card not present fraud.

With identity theft being an increasingly large problem all over the world, it may come as a surprise that most of the identifiers used, such as birth certificates and social security numbers, are not really all that well protected. Further, often these identifiers were never actually intended to be used to confirm identity in the first place, but despite this they are used by many businesses.

One of the most serious kinds of identity theft is wholesale identity theft, which involves completely taking over someones identity. This is a much more time consuming type of identity theft, especially since the criminal must actually build credit first, but it is also the most profitable for criminals.

While not always the most common type of identity theft, application fraud, which involves starting new lines of credit in someone else's name, is very serious and very advanced, as the rewards for potential criminals is much higher.

There are many types of Identity Theft. One of the most common and easiest types of identity theft is account takeover. This is often a much simpler and more personal type of identity theft, but costs millions of dollars every year.

More and more when trying to secure information, people are turning to biometric security. The fingerprint scanner is very popular and is included on many laptops, but currently, most fingerprint scanners are fairly easy to hack.

There are three basic ways to confirm identity, with biographical identifiers including things that your receive over a persons life. These types of identifiers can be used to commit identity theft, as many places, including government offices, rely upon these tokens of identity.

The birth certificate is a common type of attributed identity, which is used most countries to help establish identity. Since it is often very easy to obtain a copy of someone else's birth certificate, it is surprising that banks and other businesses put so much weight on these certificates.

There are many types of attributed identifiers, but two of the most common are the Social Security Number, in the United States, and the United Kingdom's National Insurance Number (NIN.)

Both of these numbers are used frequently in both countries, which makes them ripe for abuse. However, the social security number is much more widely relied upon as an attributed identifier.

There are three basic types of identity. One of the most commonly abused is attributed identity, which are identifiers that begin at birth.

Our identity has changed a great deal over the past few centuries, as has the metrics we use to identify ourselves.

Where once we relied upon facial recognition, we now must use physical tokens to identify ourselves. There are three basic types of token identifiers; Biographical Identification, Attributed Identification, an Biometric Identification.