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I would like to take this Opportunity to introduce myself, my name is Brandon. I am going to be writing a column in the Adair Free Press. Currently I live in Greenfield. Having lived in Guthrie County most of my life I decided to relocate in Greenfield eight months ago. In my twenty two years I have learned that identity theft is a major problem with our everyday lives. Six years ago I lived in Casey Iowa where I was raised by my aunt and uncle who adopted me. I got my first place when I turned 18. I ran a computer shop where I made pretty good money fixing computers.

From past experiences I am going to be explaining how theft works and what you can do to protect yourself don’t think you are safe. The internet can be more dangerous then your worst enemy.

One day in my email I received a request for me to build a few high end computers for a company. Like anyone else, I jumped right into responding to the email assuming it was on a professional level. Less then one week later UPS stopped at my house with a package of money orders valued at several thousand dollars. I Responded to the money orders by taking them to the bank as directed and cashed them without any problems. A few hours later I got another email from the same company saying they would like to cancel the previous arrangement of building the computers. They now requested for me to send five thousand dollars back to their company at a location address in Nigeria.

A few days later I was notified by the bank that I owed them several thousand dollars. I then tried to contact this business through internet services. Much to my surprise they didn’t exists. I now realized that I was a victim of fraud. I was frustrated and furious so I decided to try and discover what had happened to me. After picking up a few pointers I made a yahoo ID and went into hackers lounge chat room. Not only did I pick up on what happened to me I saw how it was happening to others and I discovered a lot of money was being made through internet fraud. I soon learned how scams, fake bank pages, code PHP, html, hack web sites were created and how vast emails were being sent out. Setting up a false email and address I soon made friends with people in Africa.

After spending over a year or more I made numerous contact with people around the world that were actively involved in internet scamming. My personal goal was to help stop fraud seeing that I knew more then most of Americans do. Watching it on the news is humorous to me because they are most of the time totally wrong on how it really works.

I want to let you know in this first series on how all your work and time you spent building your credit makes you more valuable to the hacking network. When ever you get an email asking you to “verify your bank details” It may appear on a link that looks just like your bank web page. They request that you enter your information such as date of birth, social security number, address, phone number, credit card number expiration of the card, three digit security code on the back of the card. Then you are instructed to hit submit. Now, you just sent your personal information to the hackers email address. The hacker now gets to make some money. How? It is now auction time. Your personal information is now on its way world wide to be sold to the highest bidder. You have no clue on how cheap your information is getting sold for.