Credit Card Fraud Statistics - How Bad Are Things?It does not take long online to find that reliable credit card fraud statistics are not easy to find. You don't have to be a genius to know that credit card fraud is a big business and there are millions of fake transactions every year, but putting accurate numbers on that is rather tricky. When trying to find ways to prevent identity theft a solid understanding of credit card crime is required. Some of the sites that ought to provide the most reliable data, do not seem to mention any numbers. For example, this page from the UK Payments Administration mentions no numbers. Your author could provide a number of other examples of official sites with no firm details. There may be a wide range of reasons for this. It is certainly possible that it is not in the interests of governments and official bodies to acknowledge the scale of such crimes. This could result in a loss in confidence in these payment methods from the public. However, it is possible to find some pages with the bare bones of credit card fraud statistics. This page for example, from the UK Home Office, suggests that 'plastic card fraud alone cost nearly 610 million GBP in 2008'. I think we can agree that is a pretty significant sum of money. In contrast, further down the page, it states that 'the government allocated GBP 29m to be spent putting into place recommendations made in a cross-government fraud review conducted by the attorney general. There lies one of the real problems with preventing credit card fraudsters. Their income is estimated in the hundreds of millions of pounds but the government solutions always appear to be so much smaller. We can only hope that real solutions are found in the coming years. More specific figures are often reported on by newspapers. Sticking to the UK for examples, this site reported on fraud statistics after some excellent journalism from The Times. To read more about credit card fraud, please follow these links:
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