More About UK Identity Theft Statistics

There does appear to be some doubt as to the accuracy of UK identity theft statistics.

In an artice in his column 'Gilligan on Monday' in the Evening Standard, Andrew Gilligan cast doubt over these government produced numbers.

The Cabinet Office carried out a study in 2002 which suggested that the cost of identity theft in the UK was around £1.3 billion per year. Gilligan used his many contacts to check the validity of the costs of ID fraud in the UK with people from many organisations including the Association of British Insurers, HM Customs and Excise (as it then was), APACS (the bank clearing system) and CIFAS (the credit industry).

His research led him to believe that in total, around £150 million is lost each year. This casts substantial doubt over the official UK identity theft statistics.

However, it appears that the government plan to curb this (an official identity card) will cost around £5.8 billion to establish (this is the official Home Office estimate which some other organisations have questioned) and roughly £85 million annually to operate.

The numbers, it appears, are still to be updated in early 2007, which means that many use these old figures as a base and then 'add' to update the numbers. This means that in reality, the actual UK identity theft statistics could be almost anything!

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Data from 2007 which has been gathered and analysed by Experian shows some worrying UK Identity Theft Trends

Is there a link between Identity theft and the English language ?

Read about the United Kingdom fraud figures for 2007 as published by The Times newspaper.