More Brits' IDs stolen than ever before UK identity fraud has hit its highest recorded levels, according to a new report. Fraud prevention service Cifas recorded 172,919 identity frauds in 2016 more than in any other previous year. Identity fraud now represents over half (53.3 per cent) of all fraud recorded by the UK’s not-for-profit fraud data sharing organisation …
Technically, for your identity to be stolen you would have to have been permanently deprived of it.
Therefore, if what you say is true, you are literally nobody.
Identity "theft" is really identity "fraud". There is no permanent deprivation of your identity.
If they used fraud to steal your money, they have deprived you of the money. They have stolen your money VIA committing identity fraud. Obtaining goods/services by deception.
Like software "piracy", identity "theft" doesn't exist. Unless they kill you in the process. But even then the charge would be murder and fraud, not theft.
"Therefore, if what you say is true, you are literally nobody."
And guess what? That can really happen. If they identity thief replaces all your history with his own AND convinces the rest of the world that his is real instead of yours, down to the birth certificates and all, then how are you going to prove it was yours to begin with without getting locked into a "he said, she said" problem. And before you say close friends or family, you could be estranged and not have any real friends, plus the thief can convince them YOU'RE the thief.
What needs to happen is the people whose Identity is used need to automatically receive compensation from the Businesses whose ID verification processes are ineffective. These companies clearly aren't suffering enough losses through this at the moment otherwise, they would have fixed their processes.
There should be automatic compensation for every letter received and every minute someone who's identity has been "stolen" spends interacting with the company responsible for getting these issues fixed.
I am sure that would focus them to fix their broken processes. Plus it would give the PPI firms something new to claim for!
"Who needs credit anyway - pay upfront with cash, that's my motto."
Except it produces dilemmas.
How can you make money to buy a car if the only job you can find requires you to buy a car?
How can you make enough money to buy a home if you have to give all your money to the rent every month?
I'm one of those people whose identity was stolen last year. The first thing I knew about it was when a letter arrived "confirming" I'd just taken out a mobile phone contract with an expensive mobile phone from a shop in London. Of course I hadn't.
First thing to do was to report the fraud to the Police and the mobile operator in question, the next was to request details of my credit report from all three credit reference agencies to see what else the fraudsters had been up to. This is where the second nasty surprise arrived. One of the credit reference agencies said I'd already registered with them! Yes that was the fraudsters, they'd managed to persuade one of the agencies to give them my credit reference report. Of course despite being in the wrong, the agency refused to tell me what questions the fraudsters had been asked and answered. But of course before I got to that stage I had to convince the agency I wasn't the fraudster. Which took hoops which probably isn't best mentioned here.
There were lots of extra credit reference checks splattered all over the credit reports too. Each and everyone had to be followed up by contacting the company in question, explaining it was fraud, and asking for it to be removed. You then have to contact the credit reference agencies raising a query against it too in the meantime (that's the best that can be done, as only the company that put the entry on your credit file can remove it).
In all it took weeks to clear up because nobody cares. To add insult to injury I had to register with cifas and buy "protective registration" which puts a flag on your report which forces companies to make extra checks when people claiming to be you apply for credit (including me of course). It was only £20, but it was the principle that hurt here, why should I pay for companies lax identity/security checks?
I would have liked to have found out where the identity fraudsters got my information, but, I never did. The most likely source was a month before I had my mobile phone stolen in Eastern Europe when on a business trip.
Posting anonymously for hopefully obvious reasons.
......“Identity fraud is the key to unlocking your valuables. Things like weak passwords or not updating your software are the same as leaving a window or door unlocked,”......
* Sure, but 'Weak Controls' at the banks is also part of the problem as evident in the link below...
* I wish banks would stop enabling web services I don't want. Why aren't accounts locked down by default?
* For example take a bank account with no prior history of external payments, how are fraudsters able to create external payees particularly: 'International-Payees'???
* How is that possible without some form of human contact / verification at the bank??? Its just lazy complacent cost control!
http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2017/0314/859689-it-risks-at-irish-banks-serious-and-pervasive/
"Cifas reports a growing numbers of young people are falling victim to identity theft. Last year brought in 25,000 ID theft victims under 30, and a 34 per cent increase in under 21s."
Firstly, percentages are meaningless without some absolute numbers for comparison. Sure, under-21s rose by 34% - from 1343 to 1803. Meanwhile, the 51-60 category rose from 28366 to 29818, an increase nearly as large as the total for under-21s. The under-21s category is so tiny that the whole category, let alone the small increase in it, is barely noise in the total data - trumpeting about a big percentage increase and going on about how young people are at risk is very close to outright lies given that the group has by far the smallest risk of any age group by more than an order of magnitude.
Secondly, that 25,000 number (actually 24,375 so it's been rounded the wrong way to make it sound more scary) includes two age brackets - the aforementioned under-21s, and 21-30. What isn't mentioned is that fraud in the 21-30 group actually dropped. Admittedly only by a small amount, but why is this advertised as "growing numbers at risk" when the opposite is actually the case?
It really is a bizarre bit of scaremongering. A large percentage change is played up, when it's actually due to a category being tiny in absolute terms so any change looks big as a proportion, and categories are combined to make things sound bad (along with misleading rounding) when half of the categories involved actually improved.
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