These days, criminals aren’t just stealing your personal information to commit identity theft; they have resorted to stealing business information to impersonate your business, too.
It takes many people to make your company operational, so it may seem impossible for a criminal to impersonate an entire business, but somehow, the scammers happen to be able to do it seamlessly. The criminals start the process of impersonating your business by stealing client lists and other pertinent information that will help them operate as that business.
Dun & Bradstreet did a study that found business identity theft has increased by forty-six percent in 2017. Not only is this statistic appalling, but when you couple it with the potential financial loss and reputational damages that accompany the incident, it can completely destroy a company. The FBI disclosed that recently, criminals impersonated a company and cost them $1 billion and hundreds of jobs at the company.
Why would a criminal go through the process of collecting and impersonating a business? Well, criminals have found that it’s easier to collect sensitive data of one business that harbors information on countless individuals than it is to collect that information one-by-one on target individuals. Much of the information that is needed to impersonate a business is readily available and public. Not only that, criminals may have the perception that they will get away with more when they steal a business’s identity because they have deeper pockets.
We have been educating consumers that one cannot prevent identity theft, but there are steps that you can take to limit the exposure to a threat. We are going to reiterate that here. You cannot prevent something like this; if you could prevent it, other companies with large IT budgets would have prevented data breaches that exposed hundreds of millions of individuals’ information. The main thing that you can do is to limit the information that employees have access to. Although your employees may be trustworthy, they may accidentally give sensitive information to criminals that are trying to impersonate your business. A tip: only allow an employee access after they have been trained on the dangers of accidentally losing sensitive information on the business or its clients.
LibertyID is the leader in identity theft restoration, having restored the identities of tens of thousands of individuals without fail. If you retain personal information on your customers, now it is time to get data breach planning and a response program in place with our LibertyID for Small Business data breach defense program. With LibertyID Enterprise you can now add value to existing products, services, or relationships by covering your customers, employees, or members with LibertyID’s fully managed identity theft restoration service—at a fraction of our retail price—with no enrollment and no file sharing. We have no direct communication with your group members–until they need us.
Call us now for a no obligation proposal at 844-411-LIBERTY (844-411-5423).