Americans Lost $547 million dollars last year
For the fifth straight year identity theft tops the FTC list of fraud losses
Thursday, February 03, 2005
BY : Brian Ashe
The Federal Trade Commission(FTC) has released its annual report on National and State Trends in Fraud & Identity Theft and it doesn't look good. They logged 635,173 complaints to their Consumer Sentinel system that tracks information about identity theft and fraud. The system includes complaints submitted to the FTC as well as over 150 other organizations. The data is then made available to law enforcement to aid in investigations.
In this years report, consumers lost over $547 million dollars to fraud and identity theft. Of that, 61% was related to fraud and 39% were identity theft related. Internet Auctions were the number one source of fraud with 16% of all complaints, so be careful who you deal with. Also of note is that 6% of all complaints were related to Foreign Money Offers also known as 419 scams. Those using the Internet to get taken accounted for 53% of all reported fraud complaints. Even if they don't take your money over the Net, the majority of initial contacts were still done by e-mail or websites. Credit Card fraud was the most common type of identity theft making up 28% of all complaints with utilities and bank fraud getting 19% and 18% respectively. Electronic Fund Transfers have doubled in two years as a means for eliciting funds from victims.
It would appear that many victims have little faith in police being able to do much about the problem as only 30% of victims notified a police department and had a report taken. While 61% didn't even bother contacting the police. These numbers also don't reflect the number of people who don't even bother to lodge a complaint to anyone at all.
If you have been taken by fraud this last year, hopefully you can take solace that you were not one of the 41 victims that reported losing a million dollars or more. You are likely to have lost about $250 as that seems to be the point where most people are caught.
You can report any complaints to the FTC via their website. By doing so you won't necessarily get them to respond to your particular complaint but it will greatly improve Law Enforcement's ability to track down these criminals and help the FTC and other agencies see what the trends are.
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