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Online Identity Fraud Up In 2009
Mike Sachoff
Staff Writer
2010-02-10
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The number of identity fraud victims in the United States in 2009 increased by 12 percent to 11.1 million adults, according to a new report by Javelin Strategy & Research.
 | | Online Identity Fraud Up In 2009 |  |
The total overall fraud amount jumped by 12.5 percent to $54 billion in 2009. An increase in non-card frauds and computer-based crimes confirms recent trends of increasingly sophisticated criminal activity.
"Identity fraud continues on the upswing and we believe it will continue to rise if consumers fail to take proactive steps to prevent fraudsters from taking advantage of their offline and online transactions and their increasingly exposed personal information on social networks," said Michael Stanfield, Chairman and CEO of Intersections Inc., which co-sponsored the report.
"In addition, consumers need to protect themselves and their computers from sophisticated malware, and well conceived and executed spam and phishing attacks."
When consumers discover fraud through electronic monitoring, they typically spend less time and money to recover. When consumers wait to find fraud on paper statements, they have a higher out-of-pocket cost to recover and it takes longer to detect- $274 and 39 days vs. $116 and 30 days for discovering fraud through electronic monitoring.
The Javelin study found fraudulent new ecommerce accounts such as eBay, Amazon, and email payment accounts like PayPal, both increased by 12 percent, indicating that fraudsters are targeting online accounts. In addition, new mobile phone accounts represented 29 percent of fraudulent new accounts opened in 2009.
Millennials (ages 18-24) had the highest account misuse through social networking. They also took the longest time to detect fraud (132 days), and were victims for the longest period of time (149 days).
About the Author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
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