4 Surprising Ways Your Identity Can Be Stolen

You bought a shredder the moment identity theft experts started stressing their necessity. You have 72 different passwords locked away in a fireproof safe, which is where you keep all of your personal financial information.

But it may not matter. Thieves are resourceful and shrewd when it comes to stealing people's identity. If you're constantly on the lookout for new ways a con artist can take your personal information, you'll want to stay alert. There are some rather surreal ways your personal information could be compromised.

Your phone's SIM card could be taken. This is a hacking con in which a criminal uses a SIM reader or scanner to copy the information on your SIM card, a memory chip in your mobile phone. Once a bad guy has the code to your SIM card, he can copy it and basically use your phone's information to make phone calls for free. Well, it isn't free, of course. You get to pay for those calls.

It happened to John Glynn, a publicist in Scottsdale, Arizona. He says the SIM card in his Samsung Galaxy S4 was duplicated. He learned about it when he received his phone bill.

"What was normally a $250 monthly bill ballooned to $1,600," Glynn says.

He knew something was up immediately. There were a lot of calls in and out of Cuba, a country he had never visited. Fortunately, as soon as he alerted his carrier, AT&T removed the fraudulent charges and Glynn paid his normal bill. Because he didn't actually have to pay the money, and his cellphone company didn't give him any hassle, Glynn figures he came out of the experience as well as anyone could expect.

"It was a really weird stress-free situation," Glynn says of the remediation.

You could fall prey to visual hacking. This is when you are hacked by someone who spies your computer screen and steals information.

There don't seem to be numbers on how often this happens, but we need to protect ourselves from it, according to a study that came out earlier this year from the Ponemon Institute, a research center based in Traverse City, Michigan. The institute conducted what it calls the 3M Visual Hacking Experiment on behalf of the Visual Privacy Advisory Council and 3M. The Ponemon Institute sent an undercover hacker into 43 office locations of eight corporations to see how easily the hacker could steal information. The top people at the offices knew about the experiment but the other employees didn't.

The undercover hacker was out to see how vulnerable companies were to visual hacking. Eighty-eight percent of the time, attempts to visually hack were successful. Granted, the hacker was posing as either a consultant or temp, helped by a corporate liaison, so naturally employees' guards weren't as high as if a complete stranger came by.

Still, given how easily strangers can come in contact with us at work -- and in life -- it's worth thinking about. It's also easy to imagine a thief pulling out a smartphone and taking a close-up photo of someone's driver's license, credit card or bank statement and slipping away without anyone being the wiser.

Patricia Titus, a spokeswoman for the Visual Privacy Advisory Council, suggests putting privacy filters and screen protectors on computer monitors, tablets and smartphones. That way, you can see what's on your screen, but someone next to you, say on an airplane, can't. And for those who are really worried, Titus says there are software filters that use facial-recognition to recognize the computer user.

"If the user turns or moves away from the screen, the image will blur. Detection of any unrecognized faces will also blur," Titus says.

Someone could kidnap your digital identity. It may not be as troubling as getting your Social Security number or credit card stolen, but it's easy to imagine how someone could do a lot of damage to your reputation and more in this realm. Chester Goad, director of disability services at Tennessee Technological University, in Cookeville, Tennessee, where he is also an instructor, has been working on his online presence, but two years ago, all of his hard work to make a name for himself as a speaker and disability advocate were almost upended.

After a trip to Africa, he discovered that someone there, perhaps someone he met or who heard one of his speeches, created a separate Twitter account using Goad's photos, his biography and "even pictures of me on my trip." He says that whoever took his digital identity even tweeted the same tweets Goad wrote, intertwined with new tweets. And the tweets being written by this interloper included curse words and drug-related and derogatory comments about people with disabilities.

"I was immediately taken off guard, freaked out and anxious," Goad says.

He was able to contact Twitter, prove his identity and get the situation resolved. To this day, he says, "I have no idea why someone would do that. It could have just been basic mischief, or they could have been trying to establish themselves as in some way legitimate using a Twitter profile. It was bizarre."

You could meet an old-school thief. You might think that going off-the-grid has never sounded better. Give up an online presence. Get a landline. Just use cash. But you still need to be careful not to overlook old-fashioned methods of identity theft.

"There's so much emphasis on protecting your credit cards and bank accounts that it's easy to overlook your checkbook," says Leseh Palay, a real estate agent in Houston.

In 2005, Palay had his wallet, checkbook and keys in his office, apparently in plain view, and the first two items were swiped. Exactly who took them, he still doesn't know, although some circumstantial evidence points to a client he sold a home to.

Palay immediately closed his bank account and got a new driver's license. He did everything his bank told him to do and assumed everything was fine. And for while, everything was.

Five years later, in 2010, Palay decided he wanted to serve his country by entering the reserves and learned he would need to update his residence card (though he was born in Liberia, he has lived in the U.S. since he was about 6). At the immigration office, he was given his new card and then greeted by police officers, who told him there was a warrant out for his arrest -- for writing bad checks.

"They put me in the police car, handcuffed me and took me downtown," he says.

That's where he remained for five days while his wife, Chrishelle, who consults for nonprofits and government agencies that want to be more engaged in the community, frantically worked to find a way to prove his innocence. She also enlisted the help of an attorney friend, who slashed his rates. Still, mostly due to the lawyer's costs of traveling around the state where these bad checks were written to defend his client, the Palays had to spend about $4,000 before he was cleared and released. Among some of the ways the thief utilized Palay's checkbook included taking out an apartment in his name.

Life was good, until about two years ago when Palay was pulled over for speeding. The officer informed him that there was another warrant out for his arrest -- for writing bad checks and jumping bail. Once again, Palay was back in jail for several days until Chrishelle was able to convince the authorities that they had the wrong man.

If you use a check book, Palay suggests leaving it at home and putting a blank check in your wallet, if you're going to be writing a check later in the day. Just make your wallet isn't left somewhere it can be swiped. Or photographed.