Too often overlooked, many analysts argue, are savvy “synthetic” fraud schemes that frequently don’t directly victimize individual consumers.
By some estimates, this accounts for three-quarters of the money stolen by identity crooks. “There’s a lot of fraud that is not being identified as fraud, not being measured accurately,” said Anne Wallace, executive director of the Identity Theft Assistance Center, an industry-funded group that helps victims resolve fraud problems for free.
To understand the risks we really face, it’s worth analyzing the statistics. Multiple surveys have found that around 20 percent of Americans say they have been beset by identity theft. The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 defines it as the illegal use of someone’s “means of identification”–including a credit card. So if you lose your card and someone else uses it to buy a candy bar, technically you have been the victim of identity theft.
In both cases, the survey didn’t ask whether a faulty memory or a family member–rather than a shadowy criminal–turned out to be to be the culprit.
When Chubb’s report asked whether people had suffered the huge headache of finding that someone else had taken out loans in their name, 2.4 percent–one in 41 people–said yes.
So what about the claim that 10 million Americans are hit every year, a number often used to pitch credit monitoring services? Perhaps some people decide that raising a stink over a wrongful charge isn’t worth the trouble. Even so, the finding made the overall validity of the data seem questionable to Fred Cate, an Indiana University law professor who specializes in privacy and security issues. After all, identity theft remains widespread even by conservative measurements. And companies that handle our personal information still could go to greater lengths to protect it–often simply by encrypting their files.
http://www.securitypipeline.com/news/173602995