Identity Theft: Making the Known Unknowns Known
Source: Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

There is widespread agreement that identity theft causes financial damage to consumers, lending institutions, retail establishments, and the economy as a whole. Surprisingly, there is little good public information available about the scope of the crime and the actual damages it inflicts. The publicly available data on identity theft come mainly from survey research. Methodologically, these survey polls of the public suffer from being both under and overinclusive in measuring the problem. As a result, low estimates attribute tens of billions of dollars in costs to the economy and consumers, the highest estimates place losses in the hundreds of billions.

Several options available for retrieval of full text (PDF; 376 KB).

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Business and economics, Consumer issues, Crime, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.