More Info than Brains

Today Yahoo’s tech-news section was headed by a huge “news item (which really means advertisement) about Identity Theft

Local FOX networks all over the country are Ex-Ex-Ex-EXPOSING IDENTIY THEFT, and there were even commercials during the Superbowl to help you avoid the horrors of Identity Theft. That’s right, people are capitalizing “Identity Theft.”

MiTB Guideline #130: If someone made up a new word/phrase to describe it, and then capitalized said word/phrase, it’s probably just as ridiculous as God.

Obviously, something that is so terribly terrifying as to warrant capitalization, also warrants a few hundred start-up dot-coms to protect you from it while you spend money at other start-up dot-coms

Google is choked with paid and unpaid links to these wonderful, helpful little companies … even companies that are going to help you select an Identity Theft company, which is extra helpful

Unfortunately I choked on them as well when trying to find actual statistics about this Identity Theft. Following Guideline #130, I assumed that much like Terrorism, Gun Violence and Global Warming, this is a simple case of general panic and “Julies” from Minnesota blaming the subscription to roundandbrown.com on a thief instead of their husband.

After weeding through the countless websites offering valuable statistics about “every 28 minutes someone’s identity is stolen … so, um… for $19.95 each month we’ll protect you from that,” I found a page with some actual numbers.

Sho ’nuff (Source: ePaynews.com)

So according to the numbers, only %15 of online credit card fraud, is from credit cards that are stolen online. The vast majority of fraud is committed the old fashioned way: you got drunk and left your card in the bar, toilet or stripper.

If you never considered hiring someone to follow you around and slap you every time you said, “this round of Patrón is on me … and you can keep it open,” then you don’t need an Identity Theft company, no matter how hard they capitalize it.

I wonder if the king of these Lightning Rod Salesmen, that dude who put his Social Security number up during the Super Bowl, is going to be pissed when he realizes that he paid my Taxes this year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under business, internet, retarded, the problem. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.