Jordan Hutson

Online communication has evolved rapidly over the years. From what started as a simple way to communicate freely as now become a place where you can do just about anything ranging from actively participating in charity events, online shopping, finding your street on google maps and even following the president on twitter. While the advances we have made were phenomenal, it made us more susceptible to greater threats such as deception and identity theft.

                At the rate the internet is growing and progressing and all the latest advances in social media, deception has become easier than ever. People are more likely to be gullible over a computer screen at home then face-to-face with some stranger. Now most people know not to immediately click on the pop-up that says the prince of Indonesia just sent you a million dollars click here for the reward, yet people are still easily scammed and tend to be very careless and unaware of a lot of harm that can come from online activity. Such as identity theft. Identity theft has become a very big crime in recent years which makes since as technology gets more advanced and broader it can leave a lot of room for error. Every year millions of people are affected by identity theft and many are unsure how. But the simple truth is that the majority of identity thefts happen through shopping on sketchy websites or just putting too much information on social media sites. Many people think that they are too smart for ID theft to happen to them and that the only people who get tricked into it are old people who don’t understand technology and are the ones who are gullible enough to think some random prince did give them millions, but this isn’t the case. The average age group with the most identity theft happens is people of the ages of 20-29. Now a good chunk of that is college students. 68.4% of consumers you the same password for one or more websites. From a person who used to do that, it seems like an easy way out but it could lead to serious issues not having a different password for every site. Personally I would rather remember a few more 7 word 1 number passwords than to lose thousands of dollars by being careless.

A recent study showed that online ID theft is still on the rise and probably will not stop anytime soon. Instead of just assuming it will not happen to you just be smart and take all the extra precautions because honestly it could happen to anyone. People are deceived everyday whether they know it or not, so just be safe instead of sorry.