A New Breed of Identity Theft

Everyone has heard of identity theft—when someone steals your private information such as a Social Security, credit card or bank account number and then spends your money. But have you heard about identity theft through your blog?

Alex Bard, a staff writer with WebProNews, writes about such a case. One Boston blogger was writing about the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots and getting more than 500 hits a day. Then she found out from a reader that her blog was being plagiarized on a regular basis for the past six months.

According to the story, all the thief did was change the names.

However, WebProNews reports that there is someone on the side of today’s bloggers. Jonathan Bailey is the author of the Plagiarism Today blog, which is dedicated to making bloggers and readers aware of the problem.

The story states that he started his “crusade” about four years ago and now helps at least 25 people a day.

There are currently more than 38 million blogs, WebProNews reports, so it’s hard to estimate how large the problem really is. But Bard wrote that A-List bloggers aren’t plagiarized as much as most average bloggers.

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— By Paul Kerstein