There are two myths that persist about identity fraud.
The first is that it's hard. The second is that that there is anything you can do about it.
And as a new three-part documentary by Vice.com demonstrates, with unsettling bluntness, if you've ever given any information about yourself, to anyone, ever, you're probably already being targeted.
Vice gained amazing access into the underground world of fraud through Tony Sales, a convicted fraudster turned consultant who is alleged to have made between £10 million and £30 million through his life of crime.
Journalists also met Nigerian scammers who conned thousands from the IRA, bored teenagers who use their ill-gotten gains to buy Warhammer figures, career criminals like Sales and the rock-hard gangsters like South London legend Dave Courtney, whose lifestyle they aspire to match.
Sales said he was introduced to Vice through the crime writer and investigative journalist Graham Johnson, and agreed to show Vice how he used to falsify passports, utility bills and mortgage applications in order to fleece people of their identities, shops of their goods and banks of their money.
"We had all different ways of doing fraud, from mortgage fraud to high finance, asset finance - there's all different ways," Sales told The Huffington Post UK. "Finance seems to work in pretty much the same way the whole way across the board. And that's the problem for the financial services."
For Vice Global Editor Andy Capper, watching Tony at work was an unsettling insight into how porous our key institutions really are.
"It feels like the system in this country is failing on all accounts, you just don't hear about it that often," Capper told The Huffington Post UK. "And if that many people are doing it so easily that's why Tony should be employed by the government. Because people like him can tell them how to protect themselves."
As for Sales, Capper said that it was immediately obvious that he was for real.
"Over the past two years I've been done three or four times with online fraud," Capper said. "And I was like, this was the guy who probably did it. So I wanted to meet him."
"As soon as we met Tony we knew he'd be a big part of it," he added. "I prefer documentaries without presenters to be honest, and when we met Tony we knew straight away he'd be fine. … I'd say he was the lighter side of the criminal underworld."
And as for the other fraudsters - some much younger and less aware than Sales of the consequences - Capper said that for them fraud "is just a game".
"Life is a game to them all," he said. "And they don't really see it as harming anybody."
Sales might be a veteran of fraud now, but as he explains in the film he started young.
He tells Vice how he used to go door to door with sponsorship forms, taking signatures and pound coins off duped neighbours before waiting for the inevitable calls about whether the sponsorship form was legit.
Of course the calls always came to the same place - a phone box, whose number Sales had printed on the sponsorship forms. And after reassuring his donors that the sponsorship form was real he'd collect the money - and so make enough to buy a decent pair of trainers.
And Sales basically did the same thing from then on, more or less, until he was caught decades later.
"I've always had a gift for it, ever since I was a child," he told us. "I've always been able to manipulate a system to the way that I wanted it to fit me. It was always quite easy for me to do. It came like eating food to me in the end. Once you see the loopholes in a system you can manipulate them."
For a while Sales was living the good life - making as much money as he wanted, not working too hard and generally enjoying himself off the profit of fraud.
"The money takes over some times in some people's lives. It's like any crime you do, it's all about the swag, isn't it?" he said. "Your lifestyle becomes so that you need to have a lot of money to maintain the same lifestyle that you've had for however long you've been doing crime.
"What tends to happen is this: you only start to take things that you really want, so that your lifestyle is exactly the same. You know I got up at 12 or one in the afternoon. And I'd do the general things that someone who's retired would do, because I only need to work one or two days a week to nick however much amount of money I was going to nick. I knew that whatever I had to do it would only take me three or four hours to get it."
In the end, though, Sales' life of crime caught up with him. He had to go on the run from the police, and for six years lived underground under different identities. Eventually he was pulled over at a petrol station, and a check by police showed up two separate warrants for his arrest.
Sales was eventually convicted and went to prison, albeit only for twelve months, a sentence he admits was light for the offences. Now he is running a business that offers advice to companies who want to protect themselves against the same offences he used to commit. Because if there is one thing that Sales knows - and Vice reveals in its documentary - anyone can be a victim.
"It's poacher to a game keeper," Sales says of his new business. "People that come with us in the end will see that fraud dramatically reduces with us compared to people who don't."
And as for the general public? Is there anything they can really do to protect themselves from fraud?
"A lot of the stuff the government tells us about shredding information and stuff like that is false," Sales said. "When you get to a professional level of being a fraudster you're not going around searching through people's rubbish to steal their identities. It just doesn't happen like that."
In fact, Sales says, there is only one thing you can do that will help:
"Don't ever share your information with anyone, anywhere, when you don't have to. Unless you're applying for credit there's no reason you should give your information to anyone on the phone ever. I've done it many times when you ring up and you trick people into giving us your details over the phone and its only a simple phone call."
And as for using social media...
"Financial suicide," Sales said. "Who knows who you're talking to? You might be talking to a fraudster, you might be talking to that pretty girl that's on there. But the likelihood is that you're not. There are many people getting caught out doing it."
If you think you might be a victim of identity fraud, or want advice on how to protect yourself, visit identitytheft.org.uk.