On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:27:52 GMT "Paul Ferguson" <fergdawg@netzero.net> wrote:
And thirdly is a figure that some folks may already be aware of; the fact that identity theft was the number one source of consumer fraud complaints submitted to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2007.
According to the agency's yearly report on fraud complaints for 2007, of 813,899 total complaints received in 2007, 258,427, or 32 percent, were related to identity theft:
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/02/fraud.pdf
According to the FTC, total consumer fraud losses totaled $1.2 billion, with the average monetary loss for an individual at $349.
Credit card fraud was the most common form of reported identity theft at 23 percent, followed by utilities fraud at 18 percent, employment fraud at 14 percent, and bank fraud at 13 percent.
Right, but that may or may not have anything to do with the Internet; see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/identity_theft_6.html (among many others). --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb