While it is widely recognised that the internet offers each and every person in the world the chance to set up their own business, work from home and earn a lucrative income if they are willing to put the work in, are Internet Entrepreneurs leaving themselves open to fraud and ID theft?

The chances are that on your travels around the internet you will have across one of those “personal sales letter” sites, the ones which tell you all about the owner, where they live, how many people in their family (are you getting the message now?), etc. The ones which will give away everything about a person, including their phone number and their address!

As if that was not enough, you may also have come across a number of sites where the owners (in their wisdom) actually have a scanned copy of their signature on the site to make it more personal - but is this a step too far?

Can you imagine if you are a potential fraudster, you will have the persons name, probably a history their working life, their address, their phone number and a copy of their signature. If that is not enough to start some kind of fraudulent activity then what is?

What can often start out as a business venture whereby you look to give that personal feel and communicate with your customers on their level, has on numerous occasions led to substantial financial losses for many. On the surface there is no reason why you cannot interact with your readers on a personal level, but in reality there are literally thousands of fraudster trawling the internet for sites just like this – sites which actually do their hard work for them!

The moral of this post is, if you do run an online business only give the information that you need to give and no more. It is nice to be close to your customers but at the end of the day you are not out to make new friends, you just want their business!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Business records. 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.