Most people don’t attribute much importance to identity theft. These aren’t just a few random purchases made against your credit card under your identity – it’s an ongoing process in which the perpetrator seeks to leech off your identity for the long haul. An identity thief wants nothing more than to access your resources, your information and then use it to make money.

Credit card theft is much more benign – relatively speaking – and it’s easier to get caught. But employee theft protection is not that easy to protect against – you are going against a person who has for all intents and purposes managed to clone you, it’s a shot in the dark at best.

Because of the ease with which social media makes our personally identifiable information so easy accessible to the world at large, it is highly plausible that someone already has our information on their finger tips. It’s just a matter of if and when they decide to use it against us.

But this is what identify theft protection seeks to protect us from.

Remember the Equifax breach?

Identity theft is not just a looming threat in a far off distance; remember the Equifax breach where the identity of more than 125 million people was compromised? Almost all personally identifiable pieces of information got stolen, this included Social Security numbers and even driver’s license numbers – making these people open to the possibility of identity theft.

To make things worse, more than 200,000 credit card numbers were also stolen.

Proving that your identity has been stolen is a mixed bag at best. And even a thief’s attempts have been culled, an unspeakable amount of damage to your credit has already been done, not to mention trivial problems such as tax and airport troubles which only mount up. Theoretically, if you can prove that your identity has been stolen, the financial losses you may experience are limited – but why risk it?

Identity theft is big business and won’t see slow down any time soon. According to IRS, there has been a 400% increase in email phishing and malware. We’re talking about billions of dollars at stake here.

Employees are showing increased awareness

That’s what the high profile Equifax breach has done. According to FreshBenies, one in four employees are now opting for Identity Theft Protection once they get opportunity to enlist.

It gives employees the much needed peace of mine and reduces their agitated levels of paranoia.

But it’s not just identity theft protection you should be concerned with. Your employees have trusted you with a lot of their personal information willingly, and the onus falls on you to keep it safe at all times.

Here are a few steps you can take to minimize the risk of an breach attempt.

1) Companywide audit

Identify where the information related to employees is being stored, how it is being used and who has access to it.

2) Sensitive information should be locked

Password protection, locked filing cabinets in case of information stored on papers and encrypted hard drives are just a few of the measures you can take.

3) Proper disposal of papers

Use cross cutting paper shredders for all employees to help properly dispose off sensitive information.