US ID theft losses decline
196000
Gimme shelter US identity theft losses dropped 11.5 per cent last year to $49.3bn, according to a new study.â¦
5343
Blog: Auditors say only a fraction of largest intrusions in recent years showed clear evidence of resulting identity theft, but they admit that's not always easy to gauge.
437150
US consumers and businesses have lost an estimated $US500 million ($688 million) to the internet scam known as &quot;phishing&quot;, with seven out of 10 lured to fake websites, according to a survey.
516399
Debix, the Identity Protection Network, today announced that it will  offer Identity Protection Services for three years to the victims of the  UCLA security breach for $99. Details of the offer are available at http://www.debix.com/UCLA.
162029
Rise in online identity fraud has companies on the hook: Educate customers or lose them.
757324
Next Monday, researchers plan to release the first-ever analysis of U.S. Secret Service case information on identity theft.The study provides new information about the victims of ID theft as well as the criminals and the methods they use, according to Gary Gordon, executive director of Utica College&#39;s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection (CIMIP), which is writing the report.&quot;CIMIP was interested in filling gaps in the knowledge about identity theft and believed that an exploratory study of law enforcement cases with an identity theft component would provide some new information,&quot; Gordon said in an interview. This research is unique because it looks across all three aspects -- the crime, victim, and offender -- and across the lifecycle of the crime, from the time the crime was detected through arrest and the disposition of the case.&quot;This is the first time the Secret Service has permitted such a review of its closed case files, he said.The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the FBI, since the Center&#39;s creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime.According to Javelin Strategy &amp; Research, identity theft cost U.S.businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.The study will be released Monday at a Utica-sponsored crime conference being held in McLean, Virginia. Utica College is a small private college based in Utica, New York, that offers programs in economic crime and fraud management.Historically, the Secret Service has been chartered with protecting the U.S. president and cracking down on counterfeiters, but in the 1980s its role was expanded, and it now investigates financial and identity theft crimes.Monday&#39;s study will include Secret Service data on &quot;insider threats, points of compromise, and vulnerabilities,&quot; Utica&#39;s media alert said.Representatives from the Secret Service were not immediately able to comment on the study.
737705
A check-authorizing company said yesterday that credit, bank account, and other personal information on 2.3 million consumers had been stolen, but none of the data were used for identity theft or other financial fraud.
760540
(InfoWorld) - Identity theft remained top of mind among U.S. consumers last year, but complaints about Internet auction fraud dropped noticeably, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than a quarter of a million ID theft complaints were lodged with the agency last year, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,000 complaints the FTC received. That number is down slightly from 2005, when ID theft accounted for 37 percent of all complaints. This marks the seventh consecutive year that identity theft has been ranked number one. The second-largest number of complaints, 7 percent, came from consumers who were unhappy with products they had ordered from catalogs. Internet-related complaints were up too. According to the 2006 data, they made up 60 percent of all fraud complaints. Last year, they accounted for 46 percent. But one area of Internet fraud declined noticeably: Internet auctions. In last year's report, complaints relating to products purchased on online auction sites like eBay made up 12 percent of the FTC submissions. In the 2006 numbers released Wednesday, that number had plummeted to 5 percent. The FTC has made identity theft a priority over the past few years, and the agency maintains a Web site where consumers can learn how to protect themselves and file complaints if they've been victimized. The FTC is also one of the agencies heading up the U.S. government's Identity Theft Task Force, created by President George Bush in 2006. "It's not surprising to me that identity theft is number one because we're the ID theft clearinghouse," said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. The fact that the FTC saw a slight drop in the percentage of its complaints that related to ID fraud appears to back upÂ a downward trend reported last week by Javelin Research. The research firm said that ID fraud was down in the U.S. with the cost of this type of crime dropping 12 percent in 2006. The FTC stressed that its consumer complaints data is merely anecdotal. However, the agency is working on a more rigorous study of identity fraud trends and is expected to release that data in the coming months. Majoras said it was unclear whether ID fraud is increasing but hopes that the Javelin numbers are right. Her sister was the victim of identity theft recently after falling prey to a phishing attack, she said. "I said to her, 'You can't fall for stuff like that,'" she said. Â
440577
Fraud on UK credit cards has fallen - but identity fraud is on the up, a survey from analysts Datamonitor finds.
380529
Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
385883
Photocopying wallet information pays off.
111329
A report released Thursday by the GAO indicates that just one-sixth of the 24 largest data breaches reported between January 2000 and June 2005 resulted in actual identity theft. The report could give support to those who want breach-notification rules eased.
547003
If you&#39;re a convicted identity thief, you&#39;ve got about a 50 percent chance of avoiding jail time.That&#39;s one of the findings of a new study of closed U.S. Secret Service case files, released Monday by Utica College&#39;s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection. This is the first time researchers have been allowed to sift through the Secret Service&#39;s data. The study&#39;s authors based their findings on an&#160;analysis of 500 closed Secret Service cases.&quot;Prosecutors had a slightly better chance of sending a convicted identity thief to prison than not (51 percent) and could expect to see the imprisoned offender sentenced to three years or less of incarceration,&quot; the report said.The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since the Center&#39;s creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime.Technology like printers, mobile phones, and computers were used in about half of the cases, but the Internet was the exclusive tool of ID thieves only about 10 percent of the time.Identity theft is concentrated in the northeastern and southern United States, the study found. And the majority of the offenders in the Secret Service cases were African-American; more than two-thirds of all offenders were male.The study also found that ID thieves tended to hit people that they did not know, rather than preying on friends and relatives. A family member or friend was the victim in 16 percent of cases. In about a third of the cases, the theft was an inside job, with the data being stolen from an employer.Identity theft is a well-studied phenomenon, but it&#39;s unusual for a survey to be based on this kind of closed-case data. &quot;This study is significant because it did not depend on self-reported or survey data,&quot; the authors wrote.The median loss from identity theft was just over $31,000, but in one case, investigated by the Secret Service&#39;s Dallas field office, the defendant spent millions on luxury vehicles and then managed to set up shell companies and defraud investors. Total losses: $13 million. &quot;In general,&quot; however, &quot;the more offenders involved in the case, the higher the victim loss,&quot; the study stated.According to Javelin Strategy &amp; Research, identity theft cost U.S.businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.&#160;
403358
New Yorkers, especially around New  York City, and Californians, especially around Los Angeles, are  more likely to be targets of identity theft, according to a new  study.
556072
New York, California, Nevada and Arizona are among the riskiest U.S. states for ID theft, while Wyoming, Vermont, Montana and North Dakota are among the safest, according to a study by ID Analytics Inc.
496971
US consumers and businesses have lost an estimated 500 million dollars to a relatively new Internet scam known as &quot;phishing,&quot; according to a survey released this week.
438073
Tens of thousands of U.S. consumers  face a greater risk of identity theft after criminals gained  access to a database of personal records compiled by  ChoicePoint Inc., a company spokesman said on Tuesday.