We recently attended a seminar in London that included a sobering presentation by Mike Haley, the Deputy Chief Executive of CIFAS – the Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System.
CIFAS reported that the number of victims of identity theft rose by 57% last year – from 94,500 in 2014 to to 148,000 in 2015.
A report out earlier this year estimated the annual cost of fraud in the UK was £193bn – equal to nearly £3,000 per head of population.
The introduction of ‘Chip & Pin’ in the UK since 2003 has driven ‘Card Present’ fraud down dramatically, but forced fraudsters to ever more subtle methods of fraud.
CIFAS suggests that fraudsters harvest details from social media accounts to gather enough information to create a fraudulent, duplicate identity of a person, and then commit fraud using that identity; only a small percentage of frauds use wholly fictitious identities.
CIFAS recommend that people check their social media settings, and think twice before publicly posting information online that could be useful to a fraudster – names of schools, pets, and so on.
There’s a link to an article on the BBC website here.