Identity Theft StatisticsThere are some quite startling identity theft statistics. If it doesn't frighten you into doing something to protect your finances, it will probably motivate you to do - there seems to be that much money involved! The following pages aim to investigate and shine a light on some of these numbers so that you, the general public, can get a good look at what is really going on. Hopefully, it will help to tie up some of the other themes on this site and highlight to you just how shockingly profitable this type of crime is. The pages will pull together some of the numbers from individual countries. So without further ado, below are links to some of our national identity theft statistics.
Before you think we have become nationalistic or xenophobic, please bear with us. Your authors spend much of their time in Brussels, Belgium. This is a very cosmopolitan city with well educated and intelligent people everywhere. So we asked friends from a number of different nationalities. We asked a Flemish (Flanders is part of Belgium) 20 something girl who speaks four languages. She has never heard of it! ID fraud simply does not seem to exist here. We asked a both Spanish and an Italian competition lawyer. They had never heard of this either. We also asked a Brazilian, who informed us that in Brazil, a home to everything criminal as far as we can tell, people do not try to defraud: instead they just kidnap! So as bad as it may sound, we wonder whether there is an English language link that connects and joins these numbers. The possible link between identity theft and the English language is also discussed. One thing that seems quite evident is that identity theft is mostly focused on large countries with well developed financial services sectors, lenders willing to lend and a heavy reliance on identity documents and numbers. Perhaps this is why most of the top 10 richest countries in the world do not seem to have serious problems. |