Identity Theft – The Latest Statistics

Every year the Javelin Strategy & Research Center provides a body of independent research on a number of financial issues, including in depth primacy research on identity theft.  The most recent 2009 study results on this topic have now been released, and confirm that trend set from 2005 onwards for identity theft figures rising dramatically year on year continues, rising by 22% from 2007 to 2008, and was shown to have affected as much as 10 million people during the 2008 year.

Other findings from this report include:
•    71% of all identity fraud occurs in the first week of the theft, and this is most likely a reaction to the growing measures being put in place against this type of crime, with fraudsters acting fast to commit their crimes and move on before they can be discovered.
•    The most prevalent way for thieves to steal personal data is surprisingly still the low tech methods such as stealing wallets and documents (either from your home or rubbish).  Although many people are rightly concerned about sophisticated methods of online fraud, it still only accounts for around 11% of all identity theft crimes.
•    Credit card fraud is still one of the main forms of identity theft crimes, and alone accounts for 26% of all recorded identity fraud crimes.

However despite all of this bad news, there are some positive results from last years study, and it was found that victims are now less out of pocket due to identity theft crimes and do not have to spend as much to resolve their cases.  In fact many victims are actually now spending nothing at all to resolve credit fraud crimes, as most financial institutions now offer zero-liability identity theft protection cover with many of their products.