One of the more obvious do-nots when it comes to avoiding Identity theft is to avoid publishing personal documents or information on the Internet for anyone to see.
And yes Vauxhall, that does include passport numbers.
The corporate sponsor of the England football team made somewhat of a blunder that would make any privacy activist wince, by tweeting an image of a document that contained the full passport numbers of the England football team who played Ecuador.
The passport numbers were published along with the birthdates of each player too. And to add insult to injury (there’s a football pun there somewhere) Frank Lampard even had his signature included on the list as well.
A persons date of birth, passport number and signature is, needless to say, gold dust to an identity thief, especially considering the wages these players are on.
Just a friendly reminder (not that our readers need it) is to perhaps avoid publishing documents containing personal information of other people on social media.
At least football pundit Gary Lineker saw the bright side…
England have never lost a World Cup in which the players' passport numbers were on a pre tournament friendly team-sheet.
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) June 4, 2014
Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)
Become a Facebook Supporter. For 0.99p (~$1.30) a month you can become a Facebook fan, meaning you get an optional Supporter Badge when you comment on our Facebook posts, as well as discounts on our merchandise. You can subscribe here (cancel anytime.)