“On identity theft alone, losses to the Australian community are estimated to be in excess of $1 billion annually,” said Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT) chair Louise Sylvan.
“In the last four months, consumers who registered complaints with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) lost a total of $5.2 million to scams and rip-offs,” she said.
“Since the campaign last year, the top scams and frauds complained about to the ACCC continue to be lottery scams and advanced-fee fraud (like the Nigerian scam), with employment scams making it for the first time into the top three.”
Because of the seriousness of these crimes, agencies across Australia and New Zealand joined forces to form the ACTF in 2005 to heighten consumer awareness.
Ms Sylvan, who is also deputy chair of the ACCC, said the best way to combat identity theft problems was to make sure they didn’t occur in the first place – and that was only achieved by make consumers aware of the dangers.
In the US, technology research group Gartner says the incidence of identity theft had grown by more than 50 per cent in the past three years.
Gartner said about 15 million Americans were victimised by some sort of identity theft-related fraud in the 12 months ending in mid 2006 – a 50 per cent increase on the 9 million adult identity theft victims reported in 2003 by the Federal Trade Commission.
The Gartner survey of 5,000 online US adults in August 2006 found the average loss was US$3,257 (A$4,192) in 2006, up from US$1,408 in 2005. At the same time, the percentage of funds consumers managed to recover dropped from 87 per cent in 2005 to 61 per cent in 2006.
“Hackers are exploiting internet auctions, non-regulated money transmittal systems, the ability to impersonate lottery and sweepstake contests, and other types of imaginative scams,” said Gartner vice-president Avivah Litan said.
“The thieves have also discovered the weakest links in the US payments systems. Typically, the weak links are found among the five or more million businesses that accept electronic payments from consumers, and the consumers themselves.”
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