Lt. Michael White of the Altadena Sheriff Station shares these tricks used by identity theives:

• File a change of address form in your name to divert mail and gather personal and financial data.
• Steal credit card payments and other outgoing mail from private, curbside mailboxes.
• Lift driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, or other identifiers from checks.
• Steal mail, especially envelopes containing bill payments, from unlocked, unguarded, “out boxes” at work.
• Go “dumpster diving” by digging through garbage cans or communal dumpsters in search of cancelled checks, credit card and bank statements, or preapproved credit card offers.
• Steal discarded applications for preapproved credit cards and fill them out with a different address.
• Steal wallets and purses—and all the credit and identification cards inside them.
• Take important documents such as birth certificates, passports, copies of tax returns and the like during a burglary of your house.
• Steal Social Security cards and the Social Security numbers and identities of children who are especially vulnerable because they don’t have credit histories and it may be many years before the theft is discovered.
• Lift names and Social Security numbers from such documents as a driver’s license, employee badge, student ID card, check, or medical chart.
• Use personal information from a Who’s Who book or a newspaper article.
• Use the personal information of a relative or someone he or she knows well, perhaps by being a frequent visitor to their home.
• Pretend to be government officials or legitimate business people who need to gather personal information from credit reporting agencies or other sources.
• Hack into a computer that contains your personal records and steal the data.
• Buy records stolen by a fellow employee who’s been bribed.
• “Shoulder surf” by watching from a nearby location as he or she punches in a telephone calling card number or listens in on a conversation in which the victim provides a credit card number.