Protecting your identity is hugely important, as identity theft is something that is more common than many people realize. After all, the year of 2017 alone found that there had been more than 16 million cases of identity theft within the United States. In the time that has passed since, identity theft cases have become all the more prominent. But protecting yourself first means understanding where the threat lies.
For instance, there is the threat of identity theft on many an online platform. With more and more people – more than three and a half billion of them, as a matter of fact – using the internet on a regular basis, the opportunities for theft have grown in the years that have transpired since its inception just a few decades in the past. For many people, fortunately, caution is automatically used when operating the internet. The data that has been gathered on the subject even stands behind this claim, showing that up to half of all internet users will hold back from giving their personal information away on the internet, avoiding certain sites and activities that they deem to be risky. This alone can help to reduce cases of identity theft quite dramatically indeed.
In addition to safe and careful internet usage, simply monitoring your bank account and credit card activity can also help you to stay safe in terms of identity theft. Unfortunately, very nearly one quarter of all victims of this crime do not realize that they have become such a victim for some time, only ever finding out by accident. But when you’re carefully monitoring your accounts to make sure that any purchases are made by you yourself, you help to ensure that you will catch any criminal activity early on, when it will be much easier to stop, as well as to rectify.
Trusting the right company with your personal information is also essential, especially when it comes to how they handle paper documents. After all, improperly disposed of paper documents is still the top cause behind identity theft and identity fraud. Therefore, any company that has your personal information should have an industrial office shredder or other type of high capacity paper shredder. An industrial office shredder, regularly used, will help to ensure that no documents make it into the wrong hands. An industrial office shredder will effectively reduce your chances of becoming a victim of identity theft immensely. In fact, a properly used industrial office shredder can negate them entirely – or almost so.
And the use of an industrial office shredder or one of the other high capacity paper shredders on the market can even help any given business to do better as well. This is due to the fact that up to 40% of all customers would stop doing business with any given company provided that they had suffered a security breach. Therefore, the use of an industrial office shredder or high security paper shredder will help to ensure that such a breach never happens and those customers are never given a reason to stop doing business with the company in question.
But it’s not just the industrial office shredder that prevents identity theft. Individual people should all be shredding their important documents instead of merely throwing them away as well. Secure paper shredders are available on a smaller scale than the industrial office shredder and can hugely affordable as well. No matter what the cost, however, it is true that buying a secure paper shredder and conducting secure paper shredding on a regular basis is likely to be more than worth it at the end of the day.
At the end of the day, the prospect of identity theft can be a frightening thing. There is no doubt that this is the case. However, there are steps that you can take to prevent identity theft, and to ensure that it never happens to you. Buying a paper shredder is one such way that this can happen, as is monitoring your internet use and staying safe online. All of these things together can end up having a considerable impact indeed.
