Identity theft and credit card fraud are so damn common these days that it's tempting to treat it like a bureaucratic hiccup dealt with by phone calls and form filling rather than associate it with actual criminals taking your money and disrupting your life. However, the scale of the global criminal network beavering away on diddling you of your earnings and credit ratings in this tech savvy, hands-off style is evident in the scuppering......

Tooting has just been bestowed with a rather dubious title -- the UK's worst place for ID fraud. It's not just a little more likely that your identity, credit and good name will be stolen from SW17, it's a whole five times more likely than the UK average. West Ewell, Wimbledon and Battersea are just behind Tooting when it comes to risk, and London as a whole is about twice as bad as the rest......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 26. Lazy or Incapable? It’s never been easy being a supporter of the England football team. The experience can best be summed up as a periodic frenzy of heightened expectation followed by unexpected and yet inevitable disappointment. And this week, so it was again. Should we have learnt our lesson by now? Expectations have been......

. We're all aware that identity theft is a real problem. We've all been told to shred our personal documents before throwing them out and to keep our PIN details private so that unscrupulous people don't steal our identities and run us into debt by buying holidays to Mauritius and taking out loans in our name. We generally don't worry about our pets though. They don't have credit ratings, so we figured that their......

The Met have moved fast on a burglary that took place last Thursday, arresting a man the following day. The speedy result could have something to do with the fact that the crime took place right under their noses and that they themselves were the victims: Burglars have stolen laptop computers containing the payroll details of half of the Metropolitan Police staff, Scotland Yard has said. There's a worry now that the staff whose......

The government's plans to bring in high tech ID cards may have to go back to the drawing board after a Guardian investigation showed that biometric data could be electronically attacked and cloned with a £174 microchip reader. We say may have to back to the drawing board because so far the only response to the investigation has been a shrug of the governmental shoulders. Opposition parties have been quick to point out the......

Shredders have become all the rage. Only this very morn, BBC’s Breakfast program reiterated the message: identity theft is on the increase; shred all personal documents before disposing. But please don’t mince those old shopping lists, or you’ll put this lovable loon out of a hobby. Scott Allsop, a teacher from Raynes Park, has the highly original obsession of collecting discarded grocery lists (currently over 250). But more than this, he also analyses, annotates......