Facts And Figures About Identity Theft

Identity theft or fraud is the intentional appropriation for personal information of a person to impersonate them in a legal sense. Stealing identity of ape son enables thief to make a frightening number of personal and financial transactions but not in their own name which leaves the victim responsible for almost everything that might happen due to your identity theft. However the FTC or Federal Trade Commission has kept a record of identity theft and surprisingly they also have the number of incidents being reported each year.

Therefore the identity theft statistics taken recently has reveled that id theft has affected as many as 10 million people in US every year. Based on the identity theft statistics of FTC the losses to financial and business organizations have totaled around 53 billion dollar in a year.

Earlier statistics

These statistics for id theft also reveal that most common types of identity thefts are communications services fraud like utility services account for your information or opening a cell phone, credit card frauds and even loan and bank frauds. The primary cause of identity theft for several years has been the low tech and good old fashioned analog crime where the impersonators searching through mailboxes, searching the garbage for any credit card receipts or discarded bank statements and snatching purses.

However the rapid advancement in technology has actually seen an outbreak of sophisticated phishing scams. The identity theft statistics today expose these scams as the most dangerous of theft which uses both technical subterfuge and social engineering.

Identity theft had been first mentioned in the literature during 1990s and studies have showed that from 2001 to 2002 there was nearly 12 to 20 percent increase in the crime while from 2002 to 2003 the figure climbed up to nearly 80 percent. The Better Business Bureau conducted survey during 2006 which showed a decrease compared to previous figures.

However the identity theft statistics showed in Texas was along was nearly 700 percent increase in the cases during 2004 to 2005. According to the Better Business Bureau statistics it reported that in just six moths during 2004 there were nearly 3.5 million households affected by this crime. The statistics have always shown an increase since then with more number of people affected every year.

Current Statistics

In the year 2007, Consumer Sentinel which is a FTC database had registered above 780,000 complaints of identity theft and fraud crimes. The data was generated from different law enforcement agencies which are compiled by FTC. However the number of complaints during 2008 sent to the Consumer Sentinel database was above 1.2 million of cases from different reporting agencies. This simply means that it showed a 50 percent increase in the overall identity theft cases compared to 2007 and 2008 data. The data for 2009 is however unavailable yet, but it has been predicted that there would be another shocking increase in the identity theft statistics of the year. This is simply because of the economic adversity such as current recession that generally corresponds to the increase in crime rate which also includes id theft in huge.

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