Identity theft. What is it you ask?
By: Jarrod Austin, Katherine Downing, Ab Kumar and Ryan Zielinski.
In its most basic definition, it’s when someone else obtains a piece of personal information to use with ill intent. Once a single piece of information has been discovered, it can divulge other, more critical information.
A great way to prevent this is to watch out for fake websites, don’t click on random adverts and stick to the things you know; along with limiting the amount of information you share where possible. However, while securing and being careful on what we log onto there are other issues. When we share details with organizations such as Facebook or a traveling website such as Trivago; we are in a position where we must trust their security. This is often an issue, as they are susceptible to breaches where private information is then taken. Over 980 breaches were recorded in 2016; with more unaccounted for (https://www.lifelock.org/risk-identity-theft/). Since some companies add in security as an afterthought when creating their applications, the risk is large. Reducing the amount of information and limiting it to specific information is another component to prevent identity theft.
However, not all cases of identity theft occur online. The major problem with identity theft is human error or lack of action. It’s causes the most issues; not just in relation to identity theft. Therefore, you must be careful what you do in your everyday activities. Simply inserting your credit or debit card into an ATM can give people access to your information. There could be cameras watching you as you put in your PIN; it could be an entirely fake ATM. Now they have got your name and bank details. They could use this to find other information and target you directly.
In Australia, it can cost the government around $1.6 billion each year (Australian Federal Police, 2018). Its estimated that 126,300 Australian’s were victims in 2016 alone. This evidence by itself is enough to justify the need to inform every one of the dangers of identity theft and methods to follow to help prevent and reduce the overall damage it has on society. Everyone has a part to play in eliminating the threat of identity theft.
Digital Campaign: Stop Identity Theft
Purpose:
The purpose of this campaign is to promote awareness of identity theft, share tactics to help minimise/eliminate it occurring and give instructions on what to do when it occurs. We also attempt to encourage people to watch over the younger generation as they venture on the world wide web unwatched; unknowing to the possible dangers. While warning the dangers of identity theft online is the focus; we also want to alert people to the dangers of everyday activities such as simply scanning your card on an ATM without checking surroundings or the ATM itself. However, younger generations are most at risk. They can venture onto the internet and complete activities with little or no supervision where they can then leak their personal information. We want to promote awareness to reduce the damage that these cases cause. A side goal of this campaign is to also bring attention to organisations and the dangers of not safe guarding information properly; especially after people hand over their information trusting that it will be safe.
Target Audience:
Our target audience is the generations growing up surrounded by social media; with the hope they spread the information to older and younger generations. The ‘technological’ generation is at a high risk due to individuals posting or simply giving out information that they don’t believe is critical; when it really is. Along with clicking on ‘false’ websites or simply being careless when online or with everyday activities. As most of the technological generation uses social media at least once every day; we chose ‘Instagram’ to create our campaign. Our plan was to target this generation and try encouraging them to spread the word to the less technological advanced people that may not use social media but are still at risk to things like dodgy websites, phishing scams, credit card fraud and malware. The information shared could seem trivial to someone that uses computers and the internet all the time, but that little snippet of information could save someone you know identity from falling into the wrong hands. This could simply start for example with a conversation with co-workers. “Hey, I saw this post on Instagram the other day about this phishing email scam doing the rounds”. Firstly, you are letting people know about a dodgy email going around and then this could lead into conversation about how to detect a fake email. This is just one example of how simple it is to share information with people that may not know any better.
Development:
Before we started creating our campaign, we researched into identity theft and who is the most vulnerable; which turned out to the younger generations instead of our hypothesized older generations. This gave us the basis for who target with our campaign. Then we moved onto looking at different ideas of how to create a campaign to target the younger generations. Creating videos, little surveys, opening a feed page where people could post about their stories were some of the ideas we came across, along with social media pages, were some of the ideas we encountered. Our campaign started out slow. We struggled to find a network we could use to branch out effectively; as we wanted it to reach multiple different audiences. However, in the end we concluded that we should simply use a social media application and branch the campaign to attract attention and a sort of call-to-action to incite talk about identity theft with other individuals. We attempted a mixture of messages. Some of our posts were simple images with important information posted on it; they were straight forward. Others were a little more complex; or attempted to attract more attention using visual images. We built on those images over time, adding messages that addressed certain aspects of our identity theft plan. Evidence of us attempting to attract attention and incite people to act is evident through this link to our campaign: https://www.instagram.com/stop_identity_theft/
Dissemination:
To start our campaign, we began by creating a social media profile on ‘Instagram’. This alone was a good idea as the information could all be in one central place and shared easily. For the first few days we simply let it stew; wondering if it would simply be stumbled upon through tags that accompanied the posts. However, as those days went on there was little to no action. A quick solution after talking was to simply talk to our friends about it; attempt to spread it through the word of mouth; we were a tad self-conscious of posting it out there without some evidence that it would work. We first talked about it with a few of ours friends; getting them to check it out before moving further. To get a few ideas on what direction to go for; what worked best and what didn’t work at all. Because of our friends’ feedback, we changed a few things, added a few different posts that cantered on reality and online; and then shared it a bit more. However, we didn’t share it in much more after that. While creating the posts it occurred to us that sharing links on the page could be a bad idea before we develop credibility as we were warning people against clicking on unknown links. If we were to progress with the campaign, based on the results of our limited sharing, a wider range of sharing would be needed. We would plan to share the Instagram profile on multiple different social media applications with different age groups being targeted.
Engagement:
At the beginning engagement with the campaign was slow. We had only gotten a few likes; which wasn’t progressing the campaign along fast enough. This was partly due to the limited amount of sharing done by our group; along with the low amounts of content. However, as the content picked up we found it more compelling to share. As we went on we started to wonder if people would simply read it and not ‘like’ it as it would be an uncommon thing to like; or not wanting to leave a digital trail behind them. Otherwise, it is relatively easy to determine online engagement through how many people are following the page, looking at how many people the post reached. However, we found it difficult to be able to determine if we were meeting our goal of our followers sharing this information with people that don’t use social media. The style of our campaign would evidently have to change to encompass the different generations and draw their attention as we cannot determine if it is inciting conversation beside the feedback we received from our friends. There was a thought of doing a questionnaire where people would state whether it convinced them to start a conversation or be slightly more careful of their behaviour.
In the end, we got on average one like per post and a couple of two; specifically on the key notes for preventing identity theft and the fake ATM post.
Conclusion:
Running a successful campaign is harder than it looks; especially starting one from scratch. To effectively get the information out there and shared takes time; more than we anticipated. The purpose of our campaign was easier to determine. To focus on a single generation when everyone is at risk; especially the younger generations, was near impossible. We learnt one of the only way to inform older generations on identity theft was via main stream media or word of mouth, these were very difficult for us to tap into without wondering around the streets or causing enough controversy to attract attention. The solution to try spread the information through the ‘up and coming’ generations ended up being an excellent choice; however, we could not determine without direct feedback from the viewers if it was being effective for spreading information to the older and younger generations.
References
Australian Federal Police. (2018). Australian Federal Police. Retrieved May 16, 2018, from https://www.afp.gov.au/what-we-do/crime-types/fraud/identity-crime
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4528.0/. (2016, April 20). Personal Fraud. Retrieved May 18, 2018, from Australia Bureau of Statistics: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4528.0/
Insurance Information Institute. (2018). Identity Theft Insurance. Retrieved May 2018, from Insurance Information Institude: https://www.iii.org/article/identity-theft-insurance