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Think about it: if you were running a multi-million dollar company, and your database of customer information was stolen, would you want to tell your clients? No. Most companies did not until the laws required them to. It's in the best interest of organisations - when they're attacked and information is stolen - to tell nobody.

But I'm acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in today's world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers.

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

I always think that if you know somebody's name then there's something slightly fraudulent about that person. Otherwise we wouldn't have heard of him or her.

Identity theft is a serious crime that affects millions of Americans each year.

There are corporate private investigators, companies doing very forensic background checks on people. They buy data, they get their own data... They don't want their industry publicised.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself.

I did telemarketing for years, starting at the age of 16, just selling steak knives to old people. Old people go through a weird amount of steak knives. I also sold straight meat over the telephone.

The police can't protect consumers. People need to be more aware and educated about identity theft. You need to be a little bit wiser, a little bit smarter and there's nothing wrong with being skeptical. We live in a time when if you make it easy for someone to steal from you, someone will.