Fraud begins with facts about you. It is easy and inexpensive to buy in an underground market.

Information is like the electricity that keeps the fraud business going. Scammers can't reach you or pretend to be you if they don't have your name, email address, Social Security number, password, credit card information, or other personal information.

So, a huge illegal underground economy has grown up around the world to meet the needs of scammers. The goods? Law enforcement and cybersecurity experts at the company Digital Shadows say that more than 15 billion pieces of personal information have been stolen. That seems like a lot of information, but it's not. Digital Shadows says that the average person logs in to nearly 200 sites that need passwords or other information. There are a lot of personal details about you on your computer that a scammer might find useful. So, another illegal business is always going: stealing data. The Identity Theft Resource Center says that large organizations' customer databases were broken into a record 1,862 times last year. Most of that information is bought and sold on this dark web market.

If this information marketplace were a mall, most of the people you'd find there would be hackers who steal information and sell it in bulk, malicious code writers who help hackers get into your computer by infecting it with malware, and vendors who buy the stolen information, repackage it, and sell it to "end users" who are actually trying to trick you.

How much do scammers value your personally identifiable information (PII)? "It's really only worth about $2," says James E. Lee, chief operating officer of the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego. Many people think that their nine-digit Social Security number is the most important way to identify them.

A cybersecurity expert who runs the website KrebsOnSecurity.com says that a Social Security number with a name and date of birth costs $4 or $5, or about "the price of a caramel macchiato."

Lee says that a person's credit card information is worth between $25 and $35 more. A hacked Facebook account can bring $65 and a selfie with a U.S. driver's license can bring $100. Who's going to pay for this information?

Robert Villanueva, a former U.S. Secret Service supervisor who is now the executive vice president of Q6 Cyber in Hollywood, Florida, says that there are hundreds of thousands of serious "threat actors" all over the world.

This personal information is sold in "shops" on the dark web and in "forums" that only the most skilled cybercriminals can access, says Villanueva.

Malware, or bad software, is a key part of their crimes. If a computer is infected with something called a "keylogger," the bad guys can see every letter a person types. This lets them steal banking and email passwords and take over the accounts.

The same goes for your phone. "Threat actors are really going after people's phone numbers to take over their digital lives, because that's the weakest link," Krebs says.

~credits by Katherine Skiba

Although there are statutory acknowledgment certificates for North Carolina notaries’ use, certificates from other jurisdictions may be used as long as they include the following components:

• State and county in which the acknowledgment took place, sometimes called the “venue statement.”
• Name of the principal who appeared in person before the notary and for whom the notary act is performed.
• An indication that the principal appeared before the notary and signed the record in the notary’s presence or principal already signed the record.
• Date when the acknowledgement occurred.
• Signature, seal, or stamp of the notary.
• Notary’s expiration date.

If an acknowledgment certificate from another jurisdiction does not include any one of these components, it should not be used and should be replaced with a North Carolina acknowledgment certificate.

When executing an acknowledgment, the signer is acknowledging to the notary that the signature is the principal’s and that the principal signed the document willingly. Signing the document in the presence of the notary will accomplish this act since the notary actually witnesses the signer sign. However, if the document is presented with a signature already affixed, the notary must ask the signer if he or she willingly signed the document and the signer must respond in the affirmative. 

IT IS PERFECTLY FINE FOR DOCUMENTS REQUIRING AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO HAVE BEEN SIGNED PRIOR TO BEING PRESENTED TO THE NOTARY. The notary will simply need to make sure that the signer acknowledges his or her signature. IT IS NOT NECESSARY FOR DOCUMENTS IN THIS SITUATION TO BE SIGNED AGAIN IN THE NOTARY’S PRESENCE. 

Learn more by joining us notaries of NC in our Thursday night live webinars all this month of December. Click the following link: https://bit.ly/3rtWTF7

If you are a notary public in this great state of North Carolina, we welcome you to our Facebook Group Community: "The Confident Notaries of North Carolina"

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