November 11, 2009
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Technology for Identity Theft, Pt.1
Attributed identity identifiers.Identity theft and credit card fraud have become the fastest growing criminal activities across the globe. These activities are costing consumers in every country millions of dollars a year resulting in increased interest rates and fees to cover these losses. The financial industry worldwide has launched an attack against these thieves by developing and testing new security technology to head these credit card criminals off at the pass. Recent developments in Near Field Communication (NFC) and Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) are promising technologies currently being fine tuned and tested in hopes of providing criminal proof security.
These new technologies are embedded into cell phones and give consumers the capabilities to perform a variety of operations including credit card payment. In order to understand the importance of a NFC or USIM, we need to look at the two main sources of information paramount to the identity verification and management process. The first is attributed identity information which includes the individual's name, social security number, date of birth, birthplace, parents' names, mother's maiden name, and other birth certificate information. A second source, biographical identity information, changes from time to time and includes such things as achieved education level, place of residency, employment, and in some cases, even other credit card accounts.
Token systems such as NFC and USIM are chips embedded in cell phones that allow consumers to connect to credit card processors without compromising any personal information. A major benefit is that these systems do not require consumers to have any additional hardware and they come with no additional cost. These systems have provided promising results and most cell manufacturers are currently manufacturing phones with this technology already embedded. Some manufactures like Nokia say that all their phones will have this new technology by 2010. It is well worth looking into for the perfect holiday gift.