Don’t get scammed this holiday season by any of the growing number of work-at-home and part time work opportunities that are probably cropping up in your inbox.

They always seem appear more often around the holidays and one of the most common scams will try to lure you into working part time for a foreign business. It will also likely require either a bank account to process customer payments, or a physical address to receive and forward parcels.

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Identity theft can be a dirty business, and if you’ve never heard of dumpster diving, then the next time you’re surprised by an old man emerging from a dumpster full of garbage, you might just be encountering your first-ever identity thief.

I was first introduced to dumpster diving many years ago, when a member of a notorious underground hacking group explained that there were other ways to rip off someone’s identity, without using technology.

Rather than spending hours in front of his computer trying to crack open back doors into remote computer networks, he would simply climb into the dumpsters outside a given company’s main offices. Once there, he would search for readable hard copies of any information that might give him an inside track on how the company works, and more importantly, any information he could dig up on how to get system access.

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A few weeks ago while staying at a hotel in California, I decided to use my laptop to see if the hotel had a wireless network I could use to access my email (I get jittery if we’re apart for more than an hour). A quick scan told me that not only did the hotel have an open wi-fi network but there were also three other networks close by, two of which were unsecured.

It reminded me of the very real dangers of using a public wi-fi network, at a coffee shop or an airport, to access the internet. I know it’s convenient and tempting (not to mention free) but the problem is that if it’s easy for you to access a wi-fi network, it may be just as easy for hackers to use the same wi-fi network to get access to your computer.

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The main purpose of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), at least as far as consumers are concerned, has always been the protection and insurance of savings. In simple terms, if a bank were to go bust, its customers would still get their money back. But bankruptcy is not the only concern that should keep consumers alert. In today’s world banks are getting increasingly concerned about the physical theft of confidential client data by insiders or impostors. FDIC is taking steps in protecting consumers from identity theft — in particular, persuading financial organizations to keep beefing up their security.

Working with other federal regulators, for example, the FDIC proposed a number of actions against identity theft that it recommended banks, credit unions, and other financial organizations implement by the end of 2006.

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