Just how common is ID theft?

Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent • Profile • E-mail

Another day, another big number about identity theft. On Wednesday, the public policy think tank Privacy and American Business released a study saying 1 in 5 Americans identify themselves as a victim of identity theft. Researchers there estimated the crime has hit a staggering 44 million people.

The new study joins a host of other statistics — some private, some government-sponsored — attempting to quantify the size of the ID theft problem. But there is no universal agreement on the size of the problem, on the way to count the victims, or even on how to define identity theft.

The question is more than semantic: The credit and retail industries are afraid negative publicity might lead to overzealous federal regulation or legislation. Consumer groups say accurate statistics that reflect the epidemic nature of the problem are needed to win important new rights for potential victims. 

There are many numbers to consider: There's the actual number of ID theft complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission last year (about 246,000). There's the estimated number of ID theft victims in the past year — several studies peg this at about 10 million.  There's the number of victims in the past five years, or ever — between 25 and 44 million, depending on the study. And there's the number of people whose data has been lost, stolen or placed at risk by corporations this year. That's about 50 million, according according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

But which number represents ID theft?

Fraud by any other name ...
Identity theft can be as simple as a single disputed credit card charge, or as complex as an imposter committing crimes in the victim's name, or obtaining government benefits and big loans using the victim's Social Security number.

Industry groups argue that simple credit card fraud, when a fraudulent charge is spotted and disputed on a credit account, isn't ID theft. Exclude those victims, and the total number of victims is quite a bit smaller, they argue.  And simply "compromised" credit cards or other private information which hasn't been used for fraud yet, isn't ID theft either, this thinking goes.

"There is a genuine disagreement in principle as to how to define this crime," said Alan Westin, the president of Privacy and American Business and the author of the recent study. "ID theft is a term that has been placed over this issue like a blanket."

While there may be dispute about the numbers, there is no argument that they keep getting larger. In 2002, the only estimate available from the FBI suggested there were 750,000 identity theft victims in the United States. Then in 2003, Gartner Group estimated there were 7 million victims the previous year. A few months later, the Federal Trade Commission pegged the number at 9.9 million victims in the prior 12 months, and 27 million overall.  In early 2005, the Javelin Group estimated that there were 9.4 million victims of identity theft in the prior 12 months.

And now comes the Privacy and American Business survey with the most staggering estimate yet: that 20 percent of Americans are victims.

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