Hacker and Identity Theft

The growth and expansion of the internet technology has highly changed the life of people in a great extent. A number of services that one needed to travel and probably queue to get can easily be satisfied through online services. This has made life easier and more fulfilling. However, this change has introduce new risk of cybercrimes. Online services demand that one may submit a number of sensitive personal information to receive services. This may involve scanned personal documents for evidence on the accuracy of the provided information in an online form. This subjects an individual in a great risk of experiencing cybercrimes that include identity theft. Personal information, to identity thief, offer instant access to credit record, financial accounts, and other assets. One technique used by hackers or criminal to obtain personal information over the internet is lying about their identity to convince the victim to share passwords, account numbers as well as other information that can be employed in purchasing items using the victim’s name. This technique is commonly referred to as social engineering (Reach Out, 2015).

Normally, hackers can hit when least expected and coincidentally while one is anticipating to make a huge online transaction. It is therefore possible for anyone to be conned. Personally, I know it is easy for anyone to fall in the hands of hackers, and it is also possible for hackers to succeed in their mission, especially if one is highly engaged in online shopping and money transfer. Although, I do have online bank accounts and also share my personal information with a number of sites, I am well aware of danger involved. This makes me over cautious while handling any online business to minimize the risk of being conned. However, the need to share personal information to obtain services such as PayPal services for any online transaction, and Payoneer services as a means to cash money from PayPal forces me and many others to share this information, despite the danger involved. The fear of losing my money to hackers forces me to always ensure that there either a very small amount of money or hardly any money in my online account. I only use these services to facilitate a transaction after which I withdraw my money and store it in a local bank account where no online transaction or mobile banking is allowed. This is basically meant to safeguard my money from hackers and other online criminals.

Cybercrimes have grown in popularity and in danger. Governments, institutions and individuals are losing a huge amount of money through cybercrime. The damage caused by cybercrime is more extensive even more than damages caused in traditional crimes. However, despite of the recognition of the extensibility of cybercrimes and the danger they pose, the justice system has not managed to establish the best way to handle these crimes. Based on the fact that cybercrimes are technology based crimes, it is hard for the current justice system to ascertain that there was a crime, since their current level of knowledge does not give them the power to do so. Moreover, the current justice system demand prove beyond reasonable doubt to convict a suspect. This requirement is quite hard to attain since cybercriminals access their victims virtually and the only thing that can link the investigator to them is an IP address.  IP address may be from a public cyber where anyone can use the computer. This becomes hard to investigate cyber related crimes and to prosecute the involved criminals. In this regard, the current justice system stills rugs behind in handling cyber related crimes (Shinder & Cross, 2008).

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