Identity theft can occur in many forms but a few have become more popular than others and can be found in practice all over the country. Two of these popular methods are Phishing and Pharming. Both methods intend on gathering your personal information by convincing the victim that they are giving their information directly to their bank.

    Phishing

Phishing is currently the most popular form of internet fraud and identity theft. The act of Phishing is when a criminal acts like a trusting member of a bank or business. This takes place generally in e-mail or instant message form but has been seen in faxes as well. The criminal will generally try to convince the victim that they need some form of electronic information.

Phishing is becoming more popular and evolving. While at one point the process was very broad and vague criminals will now use information they have already gathered about people and use it to make the e-mails seem more personal and legitimate. Often times the criminal will use the name of the bank the victim has accounts with.

It is good to keep in mind that United Bank will never contact you via e-mail or instant message asking for your personal information. Customers should never disclose sensitive information about their banking to any source over the internet.

    Pharming

Pharming got its name from Phishing. Pharming is when a criminal obtains the domain name of a bank and uses it to get victims to visit the site which looks like the bank's.  Clicking on this site will take you to another site where any information stored can be seen by the criminal. The act of Pharming is only possible when the original website was not properly protected and the user ignores warnings about the invalid server.