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The risk of traveling for business
 A little distraction and your phone, briefcase and wallet can be stolen. QUICKVOTEBUSINESS TRAVELLER
RESOURCES
OTHER NEWSYOUR SAY
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSLONDON, England -- CNN spoke to Steve Park, a UK-based security consultant about the risks associated with business travel and what people can do to avoid the obvious scams, and the less expected ones that can affect executives on the road. Business Traveller: How do criminals target business travelers? Steve Park: The norm is for business travelers to be targeted before they travel. So criminals are looking for things that executives might discard and that are of interest. They find out what hotel you are staying at and monitor your movements. It is not difficult to walk into a hotel and get somebody else's room key from the housemaids. BT: How common is it? SP: This crime is common. They are opportunists, so if they try hard enough, they are going to get, say, one in 10 people. It is very easy for a businessperson to be very flippant about their business cards. Most of the time people do not think anybody is monitoring them. Think of where your rubbish goes and what processes it goes through. I have actually done this myself -- opened plastic trash bags and checkbooks have actually fallen out the bottom, full and unused ones -- that is one form of identity a criminal can use. BT: Anything other than business cards that criminals target? SP: I see many businessmen picking up their mobile phone from their case. They leave the case unzipped all the time. They only have to be distracted from one side, and the case can be gone from the other. He or she only needs to put the mobile phone down and look for the case and then the mobile phone is gone. A case gives the criminal access to all the people that knows him or her. They then go through the mobile phone using bank account details. BT: Is a lot of information available to the criminal? SP: You will be surprised at the amount of information that is held in a mobile phone. So they have got three things: a briefcase, a mobile phone and a wallet -- this is often how business people are targeted. BT: In what other ways can criminals steal your details? SP: There are those criminals that actually look over a businessperson's shoulder when they are signing up to the rental car agreement. All the information goes on this form, from the company they work for and the date of birth -- which is still a prerequisite for identity theft. Once you have got the date of birth, height, color, to most policemen you can assume somebody's identity. It is called the mesh factor including name, age, sex and height. BT: What can people do once they have stolen your identity? SP: Identity theft tends to be premeditated and takes slightly longer to achieve. Essentially, people can apply for a credit under an assumed name. And once they have got one credit card it is simple to change an address to a post office box or derelict house. Once that address receives post in this name you can then start applying for a birth certificate. You can then apply for a driving licence on the back of your birth certificate -- now you have got some credibility. BT: What of passport details? SP: People have clearly got the manufacturing technology to pass off a fake passport, until the intervention of biometrics, this is unlikely to change. I have heard of some circumstances where businesspeople have handed their passport in and they get a forgery back. I simply refuse to hand my passport in now to anybody. It is one of the only documents that is personalized to you. BT: So when is an opportune moment for criminals to act? SP: For the business traveler hazards exist anytime that he or she is distracted, whether that is getting out of a taxi or paying for a bill. Many who fly club or business class think that everybody else in club is okay to talk to, because they are at the front of the plane and not in economy, and people seem nice -- not realizing the possibilities. BT: So what advice do you offer? SP: You must be aware of the surroundings around you. Trying to do that all of the time is very difficult. Be sensible with documents that you are carrying, do not keep them all in the same place. If you want to carry the numbers of all of your accounts on your person, all of the time, then make up your own encryption code. 
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