The Federal Trade Commission said the number of identity theft complaints it received last year dropped slightly from 2005, but the amount victims lost as a result of fraud rose sharply.
The number of fraud complaints received by the FTC's Consumer Sentinel database dropped nearly 3%, to 674,354, but remained higher than in several years before 2005, the agency said in a
Overall losses reported to the database by consumers, including those from identity theft and other types of fraud, rose 74%, to nearly $1.2 billion. However, the percentage of victims who reported how much money they had lost rose 20 percentage points, to 85%.
Identity theft was by far the biggest category for complaints, followed by shop-at-home/catalog fraud and prizes/sweepstakes/lottery fraud, each of which accounted for 7% last year's complaints.
The FTC maintains the Consumer Sentinel database, which draws information from various government and law enforcement agencies.
Many trends remained consistent. Last year 62% percent of the victims who answered a question about whether they had notified the police said they had not; in 2005 and 2004, the figure was 61%.
The FTC's report followed one issued last week by Javelin Strategy and Research, which found that both incidents of identity theft and dollar losses were dropping. According to Javelin, the number of victims dropped 5.6%, to 8.4 million, and total losses fell 11.5%, to $49.3 billion.
Javelin's definition of identity theft includes fraud on new and existing bank accounts, credit cards, and utility accounts. The FTC's definition is broader, including phone accounts as well as medical and child support fraud. Also, Javelin's report did not cover other types of fraud that the FTC tracked, such as lottery fraud.
The studies had other points of agreement. Javelin said people ages 18 to 24 were most likely to be identity theft victims; the FTC said people ages 18 to 29 were victimized most frequently by identity thieves.
