Poll of the Day > How do celebrities avoid identity theft?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Do they pay a lot for identity protection or something? Large amounts of their personal information are literally posted everywhere. They are large (but not easy?) targets

Once you make over $1M a year, you get a special tax ID
(I made that up)

There's a certain amount of identity protection inherent in being recognizable. If you roll up to a bank and say "hello I am international superstar Brad Pitt please give me a loan for ten million dollars because you know I'm good for it," they aren't going to buy it. To steal somebody's identity, you rely on people not realizing that you aren't actually your victim, and that in turn relies on most people not knowing who your victim is.

That said, celebrities do still face some identity security issues. The Fappening was one of the most notorious examples of this: various celebrities' cloud storage accounts were breached by using publicly-available information to answer their security questions. Having an account compromised is a form of identity theft, if not necessarily what most people think of, and that's definitely an elevated risk for celebrities. Fortunately for them, though, most accounts that could be accessed that way tend to be relatively inconsequential.

There was that guy from LifeLock who posted his actual social security number on billboards and in commercials, and ended up having his identity stolen at least 13 times within one year.