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Identity Theft Statistic Battle Raging

Posted on Feb 14, 2007 by Tom Fragala

There’s a battle going on about ID theft stats. USA Today has a story about this here http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-02-07-ftc-idtheft_x.htm.

Javelin Research says ID theft is dropping. US PIRG , Consumer Affairs, consumer advocate Chris Hoofnagle and others are ripping Javelin apart saying their survey method is bogus and that they are purposely underreporting because their survey was paid for by Wells Fargo and Visa. And another big sticking point is the arcane issue of “synthetic ID theft” which the others are saying Javelin is missing the point on.

Synthetic ID fraud means the criminal takes subsets of different people’s identities and commits fraud. It is harder to discover and detect and some are saying it is the fastest growing area of ID theft.

To make things even more interesting, apparently Gartner is going to be releasing an ID theft report that says ID theft is growing. Then we’ll see a mighty pissing match between two analyst firms, Javelin and the Gartner.

I am still forming an opinion, although frankly I think it is a red herring. Do victims care about the politics ehind arguing over a slight increase or decrease? No. And I am too busy working hard building a better solution to the problem, rather than arguing about statistics. I am victim and I have been a trained volunteer counselor since 2004. I get emails every day from victims and that is who I care about. After donating over 1,000 hours of pro bono victim aid since 2004 (and frankly not putting even a dent in the problem), I (and my team) am tirelessly working to build a service than is easy and effective for people to use. And helps them both detect and recover from ID fraud without putting their personal information at risk. Watch this space for news.



Filed under: Identity Theft, Truston

Tags: identitytheft, idtheft

Comments

ed dickson on Feb 15, 2007

Anyone who has taken Statistics 101 knows they can be manipulated to say whatever someone wants.

Trust me, some people make a career out of this, while a few good people try to solve the problem.

And often in the end, the career statisticians, I'm referring to, prove to be slightly wrong.

Maybe they spent too much time putting together statistics instead of doing their jobs?

Keep up the good work!

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