The Silent Threat: Identity Theft Risks for Newcomers in Canada
If you are immigrating from India to Canada for the first time, I strongly urge you to invest some time in learning better online safety practices, so you don’t fall victim to identity theft.
Online security is a major concern in Canada. Every year, thousands of Canadians become victims of identity theft. Canada’s online security is where India was 10 years ago.
You might be wondering what identity theft is and how does it matter to you. Imagine you left home to go to your office and behind your back, someone got hold of your secret key that you so conveniently keep under the carpet of the front door and used it to empty your house.
How would you feel when you come back? Stupid?
Identity theft is similar to that. It’s so easy to have better online security at almost no cost except for your attention and a bit of effort.
The best part of having better online security is that — it’s mostly a one-time effort, just like choosing a better lock and keeping your secret key really secret, and definitely not under the carpet of the main door.
When my identity was stolen, my own relatives failed to understand what really got stolen, and understandably they still don’t understand what identity theft is.
To them, if nothing was taken from me, then what was stolen? How could identify be stolen? And even though they thought I had gone crazy, they still loved me.
In simplest word, I can say identity theft is equivalent to someone impersonating you either online or offline for his personal gains, obviously at your cost.
Looking back, I feel like, it was like the famous 4G scam for my family. It sounds funny, but it was like that only. The 4G scam was all out there in newspapers but almost nobody understood what really was stolen in the first place :-)
Today, I am going to show you one version of identity theft that involves your hard-earned money that you assume to be stored safely in your bank account.
I will show you how does it look like when you become a victim of identity theft. I am not writing this post to frighten you, it’s just a sincere attempt to make you feel the gravity of identity theft.
It all started when my mobile operator failed to notice that it was not me who was requesting a new eSIM.
Without any verification or confirmation, my mobile operator (Freedom) issued a new SIM to someone.
Be prepared for a rude shock if you think your mobile operator will wait for your confirmation through email or SMS, before changing SIM, because that’s how things should be, and that’s how it works in India. It doesn’t work like this in Canada.
Soon, the scammer was able to reset the online banking password once he had full control over my mobile number.
In simple words, when scammers hijack your SIM, chaos follows.
At this point, I had no control over either my mobile number or the bank account. Both were being controlled by a genie sitting somewhere in Alberta, 4000 km away from me, that’s what the police investigation said.
Finally, when I read email of account balance reaching the minimum threshold, I remember feeling as if someone has stolen my years of effort.
My heart was pumping so fast reading the words of that email as if it couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing and wanted to see it itself. I was not able to trust what was going on. It was a horrible experience. I knew it was already too late to do anything except call the bank and get the accounts frozen.
But, this was just the beginning of this terrible ordeal that took approx 6 months to fix. By the time, I noticed, someone had already taken multiple credit cards with my name, and my credit score was completely screwed. Had I wanted to relocate to a new apartment at that point in time, I couldn’t have — due to my very low credit score.
Everything was a complete mess, and to make matters worse, I didn’t know what to do. There was no one to guide me. I did have identity theft insurance, but they did nothing except pay lip service.
I hope you got the mental picture of identity theft.
In Canada, you are left to fend for yourself when it comes to online security. You have to be proactive during good times and decisive when things go awry.
In my future posts, I will write about ways you can protect yourself without breaking a sweat. What it needs is a little bit of your time and some one-time effort.
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