With the recent flux in the economy worldwide, you would expect such things as petty crime and shoplifting to increase, as people have lost their jobs and lost their way in life, thus falling desperate. This, of course, is not the correct path to take and luckily only a few people find themselves with seemingly no other option.

The rate of crime has actually been reported to have fallen by 3.7% in the year of 2008, as compared with the previous year. This may at first seem like a good thing but studies have shown that there has been a rise in fraud by as much as 33% since January 2009, mainly in identification theft, at least according to the UK’s fraud prevention team, known as the CIFAS.

Along with the growth of fraud by a third there have also been an estimated total of 60,000 people that have been impersonated in order to get loans, credit and other goods in just the first half of 2009. Furthermore, reported instances of criminals taking over bank accounts, mobile phone and even mail order accounts have risen by 23% in 2009, in fact mobile phone account being taken over in particular have been severe with 2008′s statistics of 899 more than doubling in 2009 to over 2,000!

With this great rise of fraud there has been an increased pressure placed on business fraud prevention as well as business fraud protection. With the semi recent inclusion of the PinSentry system inside banks as well as online fraudsters have found it increasingly difficult to take control of another persons account. Unfortunately, as businesses get smarted in their tactics to stop business fraud so too do the fraudsters get smarter in gaining our account information.

So how can you help protect your private files? Here are some near timeless tactics that will always help you: Use a password that contains both uppercase and lowercase letters and if possible use numbers as well as a random forward slash (/) or hash (#). By doing this you can ensure that near no password hacker will figure it out. Do not give out your private information to any unsecured sites. Use the FireFox browser as it may warn you before entering such sites that they have been flagged as a bad site for X reason.

This is not the only place that businesses have felt the strain in order to increase their defence against possible business fraud: one such example would be with the free mail account providers who have put in place security that requires you to type in a random word or group of letters to proceed. By doing this they stop the risk of accounts being hacked by automated software. Granted doing these rather tedious tasks may seem pointless and time consuming, but if they protect the treasure box of information and personal details we, as people, keep then we collectively agree it is for our best interest, or at least I hope.