Critical Statistics of Identity Theft
Knowing that identity theft is a fast-growing crime is one thing. It is also helful to know how identity can be stolen and how to protect against it. However, it is also a good idea to keep as up to date as possible with the statistics of identity theft, to know what is most likely to be a target.
2006 Statistics of Identity Theft
The Federal Trade Commission compiles a list of vital statistics of identity theft every year. It can be long-winded and tedious to read long reports at times, so a breakdown of the most important statistics to know follows.
In 2006, there were at least 246,000 cases of identity theft reported, with credit card fraud reported as the most frequent type of theft at 25% of all cases. Phone/utilities fraud, bank fraud and employment fraud were other categories, each evenly distributed at about 16%.
The statistics of identity theft show that electronic transfer, although increasingly secure, is still the easiest target for identity theft. Napa, California and Madera, California were the two highest-ranked cities in the number of cases of identity theft reported.
Bank account transactions, credit cards and wire transfers are the most frequently abused methods of fund transfer; the identity theft statistics indicate them at 20%, 30% and 23% respectively. Cash advances and money orders are the least used methods of transaction, and therefore the least vulnerable.
Online, identity theft can be committed under the guise of a company sending email. After all, email and websites are the most widely-used ways of companies communicating with their clients to advertise products or services. Often, identity thieves will set up a fake webpage, disguise it as a legitimate company’s webpage and use it to gather email addresses of unsuspecting victims. This is known as phishing, and is a quickly spreading problem in Internet security. Most bank sites, such as Bank of America, will have what is known as a Sitekey, which is a special personalized image that appears for an accountholder who signed up for online banking. The Sitekey confirms that the browser is dislaying the actual site of the bank, rather than a false one.
People from the ages of 40 to 49 are the most targeted demographic, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s collection of statistics of identity theft. Almost a quarter of all cases fall under this demographic.
These are the most important statistics to keep track of; if someone falls in the middle-aged demographic, uses the Internet frequently for business or conducts online banking on a regular basis, he or she should be especially wary, because they have been shown statistically to be the most targeted victims of identity theft.
