In the UK, identity fraud has been identified as one of the fastest growing crimes in 2009. In response to this alarming news, the UK government is kicking off a National Identity Fraud Prevention Week to try to raise awareness about the issue and focus on what individuals and businesses can do to protect themselves.

With a website devoted to the new campaign, it’s easy to take a quick look at some statistics about fraud in the UK, and some of them are quite frightening. While the information on the site is based on UK numbers, the concerns that those statistics raise are likely applicable in many countries, as identify theft is a world-wide problem.

A few stand-out numbers:

• £1.2 billion : The annual amount that identify fraud costs the UK economy
• 60,000: The approximate number of UK residents who have been a victim of identity theft in the current year. (Up 36% from the same time last year.)
• 36: The percentage of businesses that have no clear policy on how to dispose of documents including sensitive information (such as customers’ names, addresses, credit information, photocopies of passports, etc.)

As a whole, the site paints a clear picture: identity theft is a real problem with real consequences, which most people are aware of—and yet neither businesses nor individuals are, in great enough numbers, taking the steps required to prevent it from happening.

Here at iovation, we’re working on the other end of things: helping companies defend against online criminals using stolen identities to commit fraud. While businesses and individuals need to do more to prevent identity information from being stolen, it is also important for online companies to do everything they can to prevent criminals who are using those stolen identities. Unfortunately, most online businesses depend entirely upon information provided by the user, leaving them no way to know if, for example, 50 accounts, all set up with different names and addresses, are actually all coming from the same computer.

To do their part, businesses need to look at the different technologies, people, and processes that can complement core identity-based systems and expand the net to catch online fraud. For my part, I will be at the E-Commerce Expo next week in London to talk to online retailers about combating online fraud. Certainly this is a problem that businesses need to address together. Building national awareness of the problem and encouraging businesses to work together and share best practices is an important step to curbing this epidemic.

Tags: cybercrime, e-commerce fraud, ecommerce expo, ID theft, identity fraud, identity theft, National Identity Fraud Prevention Week, Online Fraud, retail fraud, stolen identities

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Online Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.