By Hung-Yi Hsiao
According to Consumer Sentinel Network data book 2012 released by FTC in February 2013, there were 369,132 identity theft complaints received by FTC in year 2012, nearly 90,000 more than year 2011.
Identity theft was the number one complaint category with 18% of the overall complaints. Among identity theft cases, tax or wage Related Fraud (43.4%) was the most common, followed by credit card fraud (13%), phone or utilities fraud (10%), bank fraud (6%), employment-related fraud (5%) and loan fraud (2%). Tax or wage Related Fraud was also the most rapid growth category in the past few years, growing from 15.6% in 2010, 24.3% in 2011, to 43.4% in 2012.
54% of the Identity theft victims notified a police department and a report was taken, while 6% victims also notified but no report was taken, and another 8% notified police and did not indicate whether a report was taken. 32% of the victims did not choose to notify police departments.
Among the victims of identity theft, 16,133(6%) were under 19, 57,491(21%) were in the age of 20-29, 52,704(19%) in 30-39, 49,403(18%) in 40-49, 45,483(17%) in 50-59, 30,583(11%)in 60-69 and 22,027(8%) in 70 and over. Comparing to data in 2010, there were 18,334(8%) under 19, 56,635(24%) were in the age of 20-29, 49,375(21%) in 30-39, 3,877(19%) in 40-49, 35,314(15%) in 50-59, 19,923(8%)in 60-69 and 12,984(5%) in 70 and over. It seems that identity theft criminals found more and more middle-aged and older victim in recent years.
http://www.ftc.gov/sentinel/reports/sentinel-annual-reports/sentinel-cy2012.pdf
In the meanwhile, other research suggests that the number in FTC report is way lower than the real number. A report of a private marketing research agency indicates that there were more than 12.6 million identity theft victims in 2012, which equals 5.25% of U.S. adults, or 1 victim every 3 seconds. Almost 1 in 4 consumers that received a data breach letter became a victim of identity fraud. $21 billion dollars were stolen in identity theft incidents. The data of the research was gathered by a survey of a representative sample of 5,249 U.S. adults.