How Do Scammers Get Your Personal Information?

What Can Scammers Do With Your Personal Information?

Data breaches, social media profiles, and data brokers can provide anyone — even scammers — with some of your most sensitive personal information. 

In 2025, Aura’s identity monitoring solution warned users of over 13.2 million leaked records, including nearly half a million Social Security numbers (SSNs). 

The start of the year is especially dangerous. In January 2025, Aura sent 1.7 million Dark Web alerts of leaked personally identifiable information (PII), the highest spike of any month in the year.*

Leaked personal data isn’t just a risk to your privacy. Scammers can use this information to target you with:

• Identity theft and financial fraud. Fraudsters use leaked SSNs or banking details and credentials to impersonate you, open accounts, or take out loans in your name.
• Targeted predatory scams. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has warned that data brokers sell “detailed dossiers” that help scammers “target vulnerable consumers, particularly seniors and people in financial distress.”
• Synthetic identity fraud. Scammers combine real data with falsified information to create “virtual people” used for hard-to-detect financial fraud.
• Physical safety and privacy violations. Bad actors can use publicly-available information to stalk and harass individuals at home or at work. 

You could even get hit with higher insurance premiums or denied coverage due to behavioral data collected and sold to insurance companies by data brokers. 

How Scammers Get Your Information In 2026

You can think of your digital identity as a puzzle. All it takes is a single piece of information to start making connections. Before long, scammers can piece together a full picture of your identity. 

Here are the most common ways that fraudsters gain access to your personal information in 2026:  

Data breaches

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report confirmed over 12,000 data breaches last year alone. This includes a massive breach of sensitive information from credit bureau TransUnion, which exposed data from 4.4 million Americans, including customers’ names, dates of birth, and SSNs. 

Data breaches also regularly include credit card numbers, bank account information, account passwords and login credentials, email addresses, phone numbers, and other sensitive data. 

Information leaked in data breaches almost always ends up on the Dark Web, where scammers can buy, sell, and trade data on potential targets.

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Data brokers

Data brokers and people search sites are businesses that scrape, organize, and sell personal information to companies, government agencies, and even scammers. Acxiom, one of the largest data brokers in the world, advertises that they have profiles on over 300 million Americans — each with more than 10,000 data points and personal details. 

“By selling our most sensitive personal data without our knowledge or consent, data brokers can profit by enabling scamming, stalking, and spying.” — CFPB Director Rohit Chopra

Anyone can request that data brokers remove their personal information. But with more than 750 unique data brokers in the U.S. alone, manually opting out can be a futile exercise. 

Public records

Much of your personal data can be found in public records, such as voter registrations, property records, and business licenses. These documents regularly contain your name, address, date of birth, and even phone numbers. 

Phishing attacks

In phishing scams, fraudsters send emails and SMS text messages, or call you claiming to be a business or authority figure and request personal information. Many phishing attempts include suspicious links that take you to fake websites or download malware to your device. 

Learn more about how to tell if someone is trying to scam you and how to spot phishing emails. 

Social media account scraping

Social media profiles can contain your name, birth date, location, and employment information. Posts may even give clues about your passwords and security questions (such as pet names or the street you grew up on). 

Public social media accounts can also make you vulnerable to dangerous scams. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Americans lost over $1.13 billion to social media scams in the first half of 2025. 

AI-powered impersonation

Scammers are enhancing their social engineering scams with advanced artificial intelligence tools. All it takes is a few seconds of a loved one speaking in an online video for fraudsters to clone their voice and target you with phone calls asking for money and information. 

Scammers can even create deep fake videos of friends or celebrities to trick you into complying with their demands. 

Fake websites, online surveys, and giveaways

Cybercriminals create lookalike websites to mimic online banking, email, or social media sign-in pages or promote quizzes and giveaways to trick victims into submitting PII. 

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) uncovered nearly 900,000 unique phishing websites in the third quarter of 2025. 

Malware and hacking attacks

Hackers target victims with malware that allows them to spy on you or steal personal information from your devices. Public Wi-Fi is especially vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, where scammers intercept data you send while connected to malicious Wi-Fi networks, including account passwords or bank account numbers. 

You can protect your data and devices by using security tools such as antivirus software and a virtual private network (VPN). 

Shoulder surfing and physical document or mail theft 

Scammers can also steal your personal information in the real world. Shoulder surfing is a scam where fraudsters spy on victims while they enter sensitive details, PIN numbers, or passwords in public. Mail theft can also provide identity thieves with sensitive health and financial information.

How To Stop Scammers From Getting Your Information

While there are numerous ways for scammers to get your personal information, by far, the biggest risks are data breaches and data brokers. 

Unfortunately, information that’s leaked to the Dark Web can’t be permanently deleted. America also doesn’t have a national privacy law, meaning that data brokers can scrape and sell your publicly available information with near impunity. 

Instead, the best steps you can take are to clean up the data you do control, and then minimize the flow of information from services and apps you actively use. 

Here’s what to do:

• Assess the issue. See what information is easily found by running  a Google search of your own name plus your location or profession — for example, “Jane Doe” + lawyer. You can go deeper by doing a reverse image search of common profile pictures using tools like Google Lens and TinEye to see where they appear.
• Go private on social media. Tighten up your social media privacy settings to ensure only trusted people can find and view your profile. For even more protection, delete sensitive information from your profile and then delete the account itself. 
• Delete old apps and browser extensions. Unused apps and extensions may have permissions you don’t realize and leak your data. Audit and delete as many as possible. 
• Opt out of data broker websites. While you can manually request that data brokers remove your information, it’s much faster to use an automated service. Aura sends opt-out requests to over 200 data broker sites on your behalf and follows up daily. 
• Remove your information from Google search results. You most likely won’t be able to remove sensitive data on every website on which it appears. Instead, request that Google and other search engines don’t display these websites in search results. You can send information removal requests directly to Google. 
• Find and delete old accounts. Whenever you sign up for a new service, you’re giving them information that could get leaked in a data breach. Delete accounts you’re not actively using. 
• Stop apps or tools from leaking your data. Make sure any service or app you don’t want to delete isn’t leaking data by reviewing and revoking unnecessary app permissions. 
• Protect your online accounts. Use unique, strong passwords and store them in a secure password manager. Whenever possible, enable two-factor authentication (ideally using an authenticator app). 

⚠️ What to do if you think a scammer has your personal information? If you see signs of identity theft, immediately freeze your credit reports, contact your bank’s fraud department, and then submit a formal report to the FTC at IdentityTheft.gov and your local law enforcement agency.

You Can’t Remove Yourself From the Internet — But You Can Minimize Your Exposure

Online privacy is a primary concern for most Americans. Unfortunately, it’s all but impossible to completely delete yourself from the internet. 

Staying safe and private online is an ongoing process of finding and plugging leaks. But one of the best things you can do is to limit the sensitive data you share with companies, services, and individuals online. 

Update your privacy settings, use email aliases and fake information when signing up for online accounts, and try privacy-focused browsers and VPNs to hide your browsing history. 

For help cleaning up your online footprint and protecting you against how scammers use your personal data against you, consider signing up for Aura — free for 14 days. 

*Aura’s methodology: Aura’s analysis is based on aggregated, anonymized data collected across its protection network in 2025, drawing from the full sample of signals processed by its systems: billions of security signals scanned, hundreds of thousands phishing emails analyzed per week, blocked malicious sites, monitored financial transactions, and credential exposure records detected through Dark Web monitoring.