When we think about identity theft, most of us picture someone we don’t know stealing our information from our mailbox or an online source or a faceless person hacking an entire system and gaining access to personal information.
What if this faceless, unknown person was someone you knew or even someone who lives in your house?
“Familiar fraud" occurs when a friend, extended family member or even a spouse, child or parent uses a close relationship for his or her own financial gain.”
We’ve increasingly heard the term “identity theft” and heard about how to protect ourselves from being a victim. Things like shredding junk mail and documents containing sensitive information, not giving out credit card information or social security numbers and securing your mail in a post office box. But social media is safe, right? Think again.
“Social media, in its present form, has been around a relatively short term and even though you probably can’t imagine living without it now, except for the last few decades, everyone did.”
Identity thieves stole almost $17 billion in 2017. Although this figure is an unfathomable amount for most of us, it is merely the amount of actual money stolen and doesn’t take into consideration things like “time spent resolving identity theft issues and the emotional and psychological stresses caused by identity theft.”
“Since 2003, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) has been surveying victims of identity theft to understand things like how long it takes them to find out they're a victim, what they experience, how long it takes them to fix the issues caused by identity theft and how much money it costs them to recover.
When we think about identity theft, most of us picture someone we don’t know stealing our information from our mailbox or an online source or a faceless person hacking an entire system and gaining access to personal information. 
