Want to Make Some Quick Dough? Steal!

Ah, the newest and most thriving market, and it's not what you would expect. It's not for consumer goods, but for your identity and it operates underground. Identify theft is quickly becoming the new method of profit for thieves instead of old fashioned pick pocketing. With the Bank of America recently losing the personal information of over a million of it's clients, and the theft occurring at ChoicePoint, identify theft is starting to hit close to home.

Hackers and others of the like are becoming better and better at accessing more and more information about you with less resources. Now, because of how interconnected our lives are online, simply a social security number in the wrong hands can ruin your life. There has to be a black market for the information though.

With more and more people supplying their information online, this could be seen as increase in the supply of information on the black market. More and more hackers are finding how easy it is to steal the information as well, increasing the demand. In a typical market, price change would be ambiguous, but the amount of theft has increased.

Chew on this: According to the Better Business Bureau, 9.3 million Americans were victims of ID theft last year.