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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0149 US ID Theft victims near 15 million for year ending July 2006:
Approximately 15 million Americans fell victim to some sort of identity theft-related fraud in the 12 months ending in July 2006, according to a survey by Gartner cited in an online newsletter. These statistics represent a more than 50% percent increase since 2003, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported 9.9 million American adult identity theft victims. According to the survey of 5,000 online US adults in August 2006, the average loss was $3,257 in 2006, up from $1,408 in 2005. At the same time, the percentage of funds consumers managed to recover dropped from 87% in 2005 to 61% in 2006.
"Hackers are exploiting Internet auctions, nonregulated money transmittal systems, the ability to impersonate lottery and sweepstakes contests, and other types of imaginative scams," said a Gartner analyst.
"The thieves have also discovered the weakest links in US payments systems. Typically, the weak links are found among the five or more million businesses that accept electronic payments from consumers, and the consumers themselves," he added. The average loss on new account fraud more than doubled from $2,678 in 2005 to $5,962 in 2006. Unauthorized charges to credit cards rose nearly fourfold from an average of $734 in 2005 to $2,550 in 2006.
Similarly, there were large increases in checking account transfer fraud and other non-categorized types of fraud (for example, scams exploiting eBay, PayPal, and phone companies). "Oftentimes, consumers have no idea how criminals hijack their accounts and/or identities," said Gartner. "They also typically have no clue if one or more of their personal attributes, such as their Social Security Number, is used to piece together a new fictitious identity in a phenomenon typically referred to as synthetic identity fraud."
(www.destinationcrm.com 21MAR07)
Last Modified: Sunday, 29-Apr-2007 15:24:04 EDT