Posts under ‘Identity Theft Statistics’

The Ohio State Highway Patrol has seen the number of identity theft cases more than double this year.  Identity theft is a $10 million a year criminal business, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
The increase in identity theft cases in the past year is alarming and continues to grow. The Ohio State Highway Patrol says [...]

The US Justice Department is failing to tackle the problem of identity theft, the agency’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, said in a report released Tuesday.
In an internal review of operations, Fine says the department has not made identity theft a priority and has failed to take a coordinated approach to fighting the problem.
Yet identity theft [...]

According to a new survey from The Ponemon Institute, about 5.8% of American adults have been victims of medical identity theft. The average cost per victim is an alarming is $20,160.
According to the survey, 29% of victims of medical ID theft discovered the problem a year after the incident, and 21% said it took two [...]

The Federal Trade Commission released a report on Wednesday listing the top complaints filed by consumers in 2009.  Identity theft remains at the top.  Of the 1.3 million complaints the agency received last year, 21 percent were for identity theft.
The report breaks out complaint data on a state-by-state basis and also contains data about the [...]

The Chattanooga-based health insurer said the number of affected customers with potentially compromised identification and health information has more than doubled from the 220,133 persons already notified about the identity threat.
An additional 301,628 current and former members of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee will be receiving letters alerting them that their personal information was included on [...]

1 in 6 Massachusetts residents have had their credit card numbers, medical records, or other personal information leaked or stolen over the past two years, according to records provided to the Boston Globe.  That is at least 1 million people living in Massachusetts who have had their personal information breached.
This included data on customers of [...]

On Tuesday a national data breach notification bill was passed in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The Data Accountability and Trust Act (DATA), requires businesses to notify both customers and the Federal Trade Commission if sensitive information has been exposed to a security breach.
The law states that:
“Any person engaged in interstate commerce that owns or [...]

According to Identity Theft Resource Center, government agencies and businesses reported 435 breaches as of November 17th.  More than 220 million records were exposed so far in 2009.  Here are the ten biggest data breaches by volume, according to the ITRC’s numbers:

Heartland Payment Systems - Records exposed: 130 million
National Archive and Records Agency - Records exposed: 76 [...]

LexisNexis and Javelin Strategy and Research revealed that U.S. Retailers are losing around $191 billion every year as a result of identity fraud.  One in five merchants experienced an increase in unauthorized transactions associated with identity fraud.  Their recent report examined how U.S. retail fraud affects merchants, financial institutions and consumers.Â
“The impact of retail fraud [...]

Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami stole information from 130 million credit and debit card accounts in what federal prosecutors are calling the largest case of identity theft yet.
Gonzalez and his two Russian coconspirators hacked into corporate computer networks and secretly place “malware,” or malicious software, which would allow them backdoor access to the networks later [...]