Identity Theft Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Identity Theft - Assignment Example Such developments have made communication a second task, where a large amount of data and information can be collected and used for a number of purposes easily. However, these developments can be seen as positive for human beings, but these can also be seen as a negative phenomenon. It is usually called as the â€Å"double edged sword†, where it has both bright and dark sides. Though computer and information technology has proved to be much useful for communication and business development, but it has also created new ways for doing illegal or criminal activities (Gordon, Hosmer, Siedsma, & Rebovich, 2003; Smith & Spafford, 2004). Up till now a large number of security threats have been emerged in the world of computing, however the identity theft is believed to be the most crucial among all of them. This paper presents an overview of identity theft. Identity theft is the most prevalent criminal activity found to be threatening to most of the people and businesses, as shown above in figure 1. But there is little empirical and experimental research is conducted over this issue, due to some important reason, such as the detection rate, demographic dimension of the crime, and the criminals; identify-ability (Allisona, Schuck, & Lersch, 2005). Identity theft is a form of cybercrime, which can be defined as, â€Å"identity theft is a misuse of a another person’s identity, such as name, social security number, driver’s license, credit card numbers, and bank account numbers† (Denning, 1999, p. 241). As the definition suggests that identity theft can be done from a number of ways, so there some different kinds of the identity related crime, but the most usual type is the credit card theft, where the credit card numbers are used in order to steal a heavy amount. There is an evidence as per a research conducted by Newman and McNally (2007) that the degree of credit card theft through the Internet has been snowballing as internet