Research Firm Finds Real Threats Occur Offline
"An insignificant portion of identity fraud actually starts with the Internet," said James Van Dyke, president of Javelin Strategy and Research, a noted research firm based in California. While keylogging software, phishing e-mails that impersonate official bank messages and hackers who break into customer databases may dominate headlines, more than 90 percent of identity fraud starts off conventionally, with stolen bank statements, misplaced passwords or other similar means, according to Javelin.
"The Internet always grabs the headlines, but it is individuals who are close to the victims, such as family and friends, that are doing most of it," Van Dyke said.
Javelin has polled 5,000 consumers by telephone for the past three years. Extrapolating from that sample, Javelin estimates that identity fraud in all its forms resulted in $56.6 billion in losses last year.
While fraudsters often use the Internet to access existing bank, phone or brokerage accounts or to create new ones using stolen details, in only one out of 10 of those incidents did the actual theft of the personal data take place through e-mail or the Web or somewhere else on the Internet, according to Javelin. "No matter how you slice the data, it's really hard to arrive at a scenario where the Internet could be the source of the majority of identity fraud," Van Dyke said.
All told, four percent of Americans were affected by identity fraud in 2005, a statistic that is slowly shrinking, though the value of each fraud incident is growing, Van Dyke said. The total losses attributed to identity fraud has held steady the past three years.
Source: Computerworld.com, Javelinstrategy.com
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