You may not be aware of it but identity theft criminals are not into stealing identities but they are stealing your gadgets and gears as well.
Gadgets and gears have all grown to be very popular for the last decade.
Almost every one, at some point or another, has owned one or more of these gadgets and has deemed it necessary to do so.
These gadgets include cell phones, mp3 players, iPods and even laptop computers, all of which can expose you or make you attractive to identity theft criminals.
You should also be aware that gadgets are not just used by you but they can be also used by the identity theft criminals themselves.
It is worthwhile to note that identity thieves never let themselves be left out of the recent advancements in technology.
For instance, more and more powerful security programs are being developed by antivirus companies but still, hackers and identity thieves use more sophisticated methods to undermine the antivirus program.
Individuals who have malicious intent utilize all available technology to perpetrate their crime.
Identity theft criminals use various gadgets to make their deeds a lot easier.
For instance, they use cell phones to capture videos of their victims keying in the latter's PIN number and gather other bits of information about their potential victims.
Everything that they need to steal their identity can be done using various gadgets and gears.
Why Would an Identity Thief Steal My Gadget? The answer is simple: because you save a lot of your information on your gadgets, especially with your laptop computers and your gadgets can contain a lot of clues about your identity.
Let's take, for instance, your cell phone.
You have a lot of numbers stored in this very small device like your home phone number and your office number as well.
If your cell phone gets stolen, it would be pretty easy for an identity thief to look up your address because when they perform a reverse look up on your phone, they will be provided with that information.
Other than that, you can also have your friend's names and phone numbers saved as well.
Your laptop computer is home to more information about you.
You use your laptop computer to surf online, check email, shop and bank online.
When you key in your username, passwords, credit card information or bank account number, it is immediately stored in a small log file inside your computer.
When you perform your regular clean up, clearing your browsing history and deleting temporary files, important data may not exactly be deleted or if they are, they can still be recovered using some special utility programs.
It can be easily deduced that if you are serious about protecting yourself against identity theft, you should also be serious about protecting your gadgets as well.
They are very expensive gadgets and you don't want them stolen not because of their monetary value but because of the information contained therein.