Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry warned that in recent years hundreds of thousands of leva had been drained from Bulgarian bank accounts and that consumers should be careful when shopping or transferring money online.

This double warning came on October 15, only two weeks after the Government had announced the setting up of a specialised department within the  Consumer Protection Commission (CPC) to oversee online sales and services.

Lack of consumer confidence in the security of online payments and in online retailers playing by the rules has been the reason that online shopping in Bulgaria continued to be among the lowest in the EU by a landslide. A European Union study published in March 2009 showed that in Bulgaria only three per cent of the population had shopped online in 2008. In Romania, that percentage was marginally higher at four per cent, while Estonia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Portugal saw about 10 per cent of individuals purchase online in 2008.

The Interior Ministry warned about different forms of online identity theft, from fishing methods that use emails to try to get potential victims to send online banking details, to farming methods that redirect users to fake versions of online banking systems, where their personal login data is then recorded.

Other than an estimate that damages amounted to hundreds of thousands of leva, police said they did not have any further data on how many people had fallen victim to this type of crime.

According to police, not all victims were aware that their bank accounts had been drained, and not all those who were aware of it, had filed an official complaint.
On the day that the Interior Ministry urged users to be more careful online, Bulgarian National Television (BNT) broadcasted a story about identity theft through similar means.

According to BNT’s news programme По света и у нас, people’s identity was most vulnerable when bills arrived in the normal post.
Bulgarian utility and mobile phone bills contain, besides the client’s full address, his or her full names plus personal identification number (EGN).

Ever since the introduction of the EGN, identification in Bulgaria was done through the combination of a person’s three names and the EGN.
Obtaining someone’s utility bill is generally extremely easy because post is either delivered in a stack for the entire entrance instead of in individual mailboxes, or, even when it is put into individual postboxes, these boxes are generally easily accessible and not locked.

Veneta Shopova, chairperson of the Commission for the Protection of Personal Data, was quoted by BNT as saying that "striking cases were those in which the victim does not know that his or her personal data have ended up in the hands of a third person. In these cases countless transactions could be done using this data".

Types of abuse were said to range from the purchase of prepaid services to the sale of the victim’s apartment.
According to BNT, various lottery and other games functioned as large networks for collecting personal data.

"Last year we had the case of a game organiser who collected far more data than needed for the objectives of the game," Shopova said.
Under Bulgarian law, banks are allowed to photo-copy your ID card, but only once every five years for identification purposes. Anyone else who requests to make a copy of your ID card, was in violation of Bulgarian law and you have the right to refuse, BNT said.