As a college student, identity thieves have their targets set on you. You, more than others, need to be aware of this threat. Becoming a victim of identity theft at this age can be very detrimental. It can ruin your credit rating before you ever have a chance to establish it. There are several reasons that college students are the targets of identity theft.
College Students Constantly Get Offers
As an adult, you don’t see as many offers for credit cards. At the age of a college student, however, they come almost non-stop. This is because you haven’t had a chance to establish poor credit habits and because it’s easy for credit card companies to hook you while you are young.
Since you get so many offers, you are less likely to see a scammer’s attempt to get your information as strange. It seems like a normal occurrence, and identity thieves know this.
In fact, college students are one of the largest demographics to fall victim to credit card scams. If you think you’ve been taken in by credit card scams, take action right away.
College Students Lack Experience
Since college students don’t have a lot of life experience, you are more easily tricked. It’s hard for something to strike you as abnormal, when you aren’t sure what normal is.
Scammers live for situations like this. It doesn’t take much effort for them to trick college students.
College Students Are Distracted
College students have a lot on their mind. New responsibilities, newfound freedoms, new friends and difficult assignments keep you busy. For these reasons, you often don’t pay much attention to your billing statements.
This is no secret to scammers. They are well aware of the fact that it is easy for them to get away with spending reasonable amounts of their money. Most likely, the students won’t even notice that anything is wrong.
College Students Discard Offers
As we talked about earlier, college students get a lot of offers for credit cards. They tend to throw a lot of these away. If an identity thief gets ahold of the information, they can easily find one of these offers and sign up for a card using the stolen information.
Easy avenues such as these make college students the ideal target for scammers. For adults, it’s often more difficult to sign up for a new credit card. Identity thieves don’t have to deal with these issues with college students.
College Students Are Suggestible
It’s easy to convince college students to do what they want. If they sound authoritative, students often believe they should do what they are told. You are just now finding their independence. You have spent years taking orders from authority figures. It will take a while for you to gain the confidence they need to trust your own decision-making process.
Identity thieves will take advantage of this knowledge. They sound confident and use high-pressure techniques to convince college students to give them sensitive information.
College Students Have A Target on Their Back
As a college student, it is absolutely vital for you to be aware of these issues. There are several reasons that identity thieves target college students, and without the proper knowledge, you will be very susceptible to their scams.
The fact that you constantly get offers, lack experience, are distracted, discard offers and are suggestible makes it very easy for people to take advantage of you. Make sure you take the proper precautions to avoid dealing with this serious issue.
