American Identity Theft Statistics

The American identity theft statistics are simply frightening.

According to author Frank W. Abagnale, in his book of 2007 called 'Stealing Your Life', an amazing 38% of American victims never tell anyone.

He also explains the results of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, who think that in 2001, there were 750,000 victims and total losses of around $5 billion. In 2004, these figures rose to 10 million victims of some sort of ID theft and total losses of $54 billion. By 2005, the FTC were receiving more calls and complaints about this one issue than anything else.

As with any well researched book, he lists many unusual variations on ID fraud. For example, seasonal workers who use someone elses Social Security number to work and thus leave someone else to pay the taxes.

The Identity Theft Resource Centre study concluded that the average American victim of identity theft spends 330 hours putting things right. The number of hours reported ranged from just 3 to a massive 5,840. The hard costs to sort out a credit report range from $881 to $1,378. In short, fixing a problem is not necessarily a simple matter. This is something that is only generally realised after the fact though.

This is all criminal in the USA. The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 makes ID fraud a federal crime. The maximum penalty is 15 years in prison and substantial fines. However, the FBI is under a directive which prevents it from investigating any 'white-collar' crime with a value of below $100,000. Even worse, it seems that for a US Attorney to prosecute such a case, they set a benchmark at $250,000.

Unfortunately, a Gartner study suggests that an ID thief has roughly a 1 in 700 chance of being caught by law enforcement.

As you might imagine, not only are the American identity theft statistics more than a little worrying, the rates of punishment appear to be even worse.

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