What is the most common way that identity thieves steal financial information?
One way to get your specific financial information is: either to extract your credit card information at any retailer that you may do business with, or they can easily go into your trash and get the statements that you may throw away. That's why I always recommend that people shred anything and everything, with any account information, especially any financial data. The unfortunate fact of credit card fraud is that there's really no way to protect your credit cards. In general, when people ask me, "How do I protect my credit card number?", I say there's only one way--cancel the account--that's it. Because once you have a credit card, you can't possibly trust that every place that you use it, that the waiter or waitress, or the salesclerk at the point of purchase--or the point of sale, is going to be responsible with that card, or they're not going to steal it. So really, there's no way to protect your credit card information. The only real way to respond to credit card fraud, is by paying close attention to your credit card statements, and making sure that you're refuting any unauthorized charges, within a sixty day period of time. As long as you refute those charges within two billing cycles, generally you are going to be in pretty good shape, and those charges will be taken off your credit card statements.
