In the old days someone needed to steal your credit card and forge your signature to take a large chunk of your savings or if you're quite unlucky make a clean slate of your remaining balance. Nowadays, thieves have found an unwitting partner. You could say that they have a new terminology for such unlawful practices, its part of what's called cybercrime. Today, people have come a long way from making purchases at the store or the mall to just sitting back logging in to E-bay or any consumer oriented websites that deals in E commerce or sells products or services in return for payments made online.

As a result, a lot of consumers risk divulging their private credit card information to companies that swear to the secrecy of the code but somehow even with this in place a lot of credit card information get swapped and are misused and abused by individuals over the internet. These would be hackers that harness their skills together with technology to gather private information that lead to heavy debts or unaccounted losses to the card holders. Some consumers though just simply fail to see or read the fine print that excludes the hosting company from taking responsibility for the losses of the customer in providing such private information.

How do crooks gain entry to their private information? Some websites, in accepting memberships almost always ask for a customer's credit card information. The amount for using that websites product or service is then deducted and billed to the credit card automatically. A customer is usually provided by the website some billing notice so that he could see that he is being deducted fairly according to what he receives. The credit card information that is provided by the consumer is in electronic form that is decipherable and stored only in the company's servers or computers. They are supposed to be used only as database for the company's needs. Some individuals hack their way thru the servers of these companies and use technology to decrypt or remove the electronic mask protecting the actual credit card number of the holder.

They also get to hack other information such as credit balance remaining so that they could make their purchases for free at the expense of the card holder. Some make small hardly noticeable purchases that they are hardly caught while some make greedy substantial purchases that alerts the cardholder immediately but arrests are few and hard since these culprits use stealth technology so that their footprints in the internet aren't identified.

Some companies make money just selling the information without knowledge or consent of the cardholder. They usually are free floating in the internet and can be grabbed by technically proficient hackers who live off the sweat of others. What can be done to avoid identity theft? If you are unsure of the company or website don't give out your credit card number do little background searching or go to forums on the website to see if the company is responsible enough.