Current Facts + Statistics: Identity theft and cybercrime

The scope of identity theft

Identity theft continues to pose challenges for consumers as criminals develop new mechanisms to commit fraud. According to the 2019 Identity Fraud Study from Javelin Strategy & Research, the number of consumers who were victims of identity fraud fell to 14.4 million in 2018, down from a record high of 16.7 million in 2017. However, identity fraud victims in 2018 bore a heavier financial burden: 3.3 million people were responsible for some of the liability of the fraud committed against them, nearly three times as many as in 2016. Moreover, these victims’ out-of-pocket fraud costs more than doubled from 2016 to 2018 to $1.7 billion. New account fraud losses also rose slightly, with criminals beginning to focus their attention on different financial accounts, such as loyalty and rewards programs and retirement accounts. Additionally, criminals are becoming adept at foiling authentication processes, particularly mobile phone account takeovers. These takeovers nearly doubled to 680,000 victims in 2018, compared with 380,000 in 2017. The study does note that the shift to embedded chip cards is helping to contain existing card fraud, which showed the steepest decline of any fraud type in 2018, with losses at $14.7 billion in 2018, down from $16.8 billion in 2017.

Please click here for the full article. 

For additional discussion as to how you can lower your business risks, please reach out to your account manager at Provider Group, or contact us at 781-444-0347 to learn more about how Provider could be the right fit for you.