ABSTRACT

Today’s media, as well as many security professionals, often create the impression that identity theft is a modern creation, a result of the marriage between large-scale access to instantaneous information and an age-old desire of certain members of society to acquire knowledge and wealth that are not rightfully theirs. Although the creation and mass adoption of inexpensive computers, networks, and online data repositories in the last 30 years has, perhaps, accelerated the growth of this area of crime, identity theft is a problem that has plagued humans since the earliest of times.