Released: February 07, 2007

FTC: ID theft still top complaint

Contact: Federal Trade Commission

Download PDF of the FTC Top Frauds of 2006 report.

The Federal Trade Commission today issued its annual report, “Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Complaint Data” on complaints consumers have filed with the agency. For the seventh year in a row, identity theft tops the list, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,354 complaints received between January 1 and December 31, 2006. Other categories near the top of the complaint list include shop-at-home/catalog sales; prizes, sweepstakes and lotteries; Internet services and computer complaints; and Internet auction fraud.

“Consumers’ help in stopping unlawful operations is critical,” said Deborah Platt Majoras, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “By filing a complaint with the FTC, consumers are making information available to more than 1,600 law enforcement agencies that have access to our secure database.”

“It’s as easy as a click or a call,” she said. “The FTC has an online complaint form at FTC.gov, or consumers can reach us at 1-877-FTC-HELP.”

This year brought some firsts. For the first time, complaint data has been broken out by metropolitan statistical areas with populations greater than 100,000. Find breakout data by state on the FTC web site. And this year, complaint data has been sorted into16 categories.

The top five complaint categories besides ID theft, were shop-at-home and catalog sales; prizes, sweepstakes and lotteries; internet services and computer complaints; internet aucitons, and foreign money offers. List of all top complaints.

Other findings from the report include:

• Consumers reported fraud losses totaling more than $1.1 billion; the median monetary loss was $500. Eighty-five percent of the consumers reporting fraud also reported an amount lost.
• The percentage of fraud complaints with wire transfer as the reported payment method continues to increase. Twenty-three percent of the consumers reported wire transfer as the payment method, an increase of eight percentage points from calendar year 2005.
• Credit card fraud (25 percent) was the most common form of reported identity theft, followed by phone or utilities fraud (16 percent), bank fraud (16 percent), and employment fraud (14 percent).

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