Recently law enforcement officials in the United States and Egypt cracked a sophisticated identity theft ring that used phishing to steal close to two million dollars from Wells Fargo and Bank of America Customers. This comes on the heels of another international ring that reported stole forty million credit and debit cards from numerous high profile companies.

This type of news would easily give you the impression that the internet is the playground for identity thieves. While you definitely have to watch yourself in cyberspace from pharming and phishing scams still are no match for identity theft in the offline world.

In a study conducted by the Better Business Bureau offline identity theft still dwarfs the thievery in cyberspace by a wide margin. It also on average costs more money and takes longer to fix than online theft. Indeed those who do most of their transactions on the internet were able to detect identity theft a lot quicker than their offline counterparts.

In a way this is not hard to figure. Identity thieves who operate offline have so many techniques to choose from. ATM rigging, shoulder surfing, skimming, dumpster diving and a whole host of others including the mail.

Identity theft thru the mail has a couple of things going for it. One is that thieves just flat out break into your mailbox. Many people whether they own their own house or live in an apartment are still working with the old style mailboxes which are less than secure. It's not hard for identity thief to do a quick surveillance job of the neighborhood and then figure out what resident's mailbox is going to be the easiest pickings.

And their thievery probably gets a major helping hand not so much from you but from all those credit card offers you receive. Of course it does not have to be just credit card offers anything will do but it does not hurt. The junk mail industry does big business so they provide mail fraudsters and identity thieves plenty of golden opportunities.

Identity thieves are also calculating that you will not open the majority of these solicitations or shred them. Just that the information will take a direct path from your mailbox to your garbage. Enter the dumpster divers who know that a gold mine is waiting for them in your trash can.

The solution is to shred all of your personal information that you plan on disposing of, remove yourself from as many junk mail lists as possible and get a secure mailbox.

It may not remove the threat of identity theft altogether but it can tilt the odds of preventing it heavily in your favor.