MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Identity theft, main US consumer fraud for 7 years running

Identity theft for the seventh year in a row topped in 2007 the list of consumer fraud complaints recorded by the United States Federal Trade Commission, FTC. The list contained in the publication “Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Complaint Data January-December 2007,” showed that of 813,899 total complaints received in 2007, 258,427, or 32% were related to identity theft.

The report breaks out complaint data on a state-by-state basis and also contains data about the main 50 US metropolitan areas reporting the highest per capita incidence of fraud and the 50 metropolitan areas reporting the highest incidence of identity theft. The report states that credit card fraud was the most common form of reported identity theft at 23%, followed by utilities fraud at 18%, employment fraud at 14%, and bank fraud at 13%. Consumers reported fraud losses totaling more than 1.2 billion US dollars with the median monetary loss per person at 349 US dollar, the report states. In almost 64% of cases reported the fraudsters contacted their victims by internet. In 49% of cases victims were e-mailed and in the other 15% net services were used. The top 20 complaint categories were: Identity theft, 32%; Shot at Home/Catalog Sales, 8%; Internet services, 5%; Foreign money offers, 4%; Computer equipment and software, 3%; Internet auctions, 3%; Health Care claims, 2%; Travel, vacations and timeshares, 2%; Advance-fee loans and credit protection repair, 2%; Investments, 2%; magazines and buyers club, 2% and the rest of the list compiles complaints below one percent. The FTC collects consumer fraud complaints from more than 125 other organizations and makes them available to more than 1,600 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the US and abroad via Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database. In 2007, the FTC received almost 140,000 more consumer fraud complaints than in 2006. These additional complaints came from numerous data contributors, primarily the Better Business Bureaus.