Are you who you say you are?
Philip Grindell
Protecting VIPs & UHNW Clients from Targeted Attacks, Stalking & Fixated Threats | Security & Threat Assessment Specialist | Chartered Security Professional | Featured in Spear's 500 | Author & Speaker
Identity theft is on the rise. In a period when the property market in the UK is on a rapid downward spiral and mortgages are increasingly expensive and difficult to secure, you may be surprised to hear that mortgage-related fraud in England and Wales increased by 32.8% in the past year.?
This isn't purely a UK issue, in the US, over 1.1 million people reported incidents of identity theft to the Federal Trade Commission in 2022.
Identity theft and impersonation is where a person’s identity is fabricated, often using fake or stolen ID. They can then use the false identity to sell, mortgage, or remortgage someone else’s property before running off with the large sums of cash they receive as a result. Stolen identity can also result in the title deeds of a property being changed, essentially enabling a criminal to put the property in their own name or that of a co-conspirator.?
A simple way or countering this is to sign up the Land Registry property alert register which will send an alert to inform you if certain activities occurs on your monitored properties.? You can take action if needed.
The reality is that very often your identity is acquired due to the volume of private information that is publicly available. I demonstrated this to a client by creating a fake social media account in their name, using information found via open source. The profile was so convincing that I managed to have his own family connect with the profile.?
You may think that your cyber security is secure, and so you are safe, but that is not the case. Hackers and cyber criminals steal your data from companies that you use. Almost weekly we read about a global brand that has had its data stolen, including recently the police! This data is then stolen on the dark web.
The key to counter this is to have one of our Digital Vulnerability Assessment conducted to ascertain what information is accessible and where appropriate remove it. This process also highlights how vulnerabile you might be to a fixated person, stalker? and other adversaries. The next phase is where set up a monitoring system to identify any breach data of yours that appears on the open, deep or dark web, including our passwords.?
?DM me further details of our Digital Vulnerability Assessment.
Our next episode features Jameson Ritter, CTM, CPP, PSP, PCI who shares his wisdom and experience from his new book "This Book Saves Lives"?
October's guest is Middle East strategist Corina Goetz ? who shares her wisdom of doing business in and with the Middle East. It is not to be missed!
Have you ever looked at a someone and asked yourself “I wonder what makes them behave like that?
?Within the worlds of Human Resources, Crisis Communications, Public Relations and Security amongst others, we look for effective and rapid ways to defuse a situation.
?One method that is often overlooked and yet hugely effective is the field of Behavioural Analysis and Profiling. Often thought confined to criminal investigations, it’s methods and benefits are equally transferrable to the commercial environment.
?Put simply, we humans are not (yet) robots. What may work for one person may not for another. Behavioural analysis and profiling make inferences based on an individual’s personality and behaviour.?
?There is good reason why its effectiveness is so commonly used in the investigative world, because it adds real value to our decision making. Whilst many people have extensive experience and an understanding of human behaviour, the expertise of qualified and experienced forensic or clinical psychologists is illuminating and takes that understanding to a whole new level.
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5 Key facts on Threats to Prominent People
1. Most threats are driven by a personal grievance: personal grievances, having four elements.
When you eliminate any of those four elements, the personal grievance is usually defused.
?2. There has been a narcissism shift over recent years with regards to the motivation by attackers: from a desire for fame to an angry sense of entitlement.
?3. The percentage of individuals that attack a public figure after having directly threatened is actually quite small, probably no more than 5%.....so in 95% of cases there will be no direct threat made.
?4. Leakage is very common: there will be leakage of intent to a third party in 60 to 90% of cases of targeted attacks, including on public figures
?5. The 3 most common proximal pre-attack warning behaviours are:
If anything in this newsletter has caused you to think you may benefit from our help, please don't hesitate to send me a DM.