Al Qaeda’s Economic War and Online Identity Theft: A Perfect Storm
By Online Security Authority on Dec 23, 2006 in ID theft
This post was written by John Bambenek on 22 December, 2006 (13:22) | Read more.
Online identity theft has become a constant concern in a world of online shopping and bill paying. In the rush to move to the internet age, many companies simply neglected security concerns and the result has luckily not been as bad as it could have been.
In 2005, I did an estimate of the amount of money that was compromised because of online identity theft and came up with $24 billion in the United States alone. With the help of Agnieszka Klus, I redid the study recently with more realistic numbers and found over $55 billion was compromised. That amount is enough to pay off the entire state debt of Illinois.
Despite this large amount of money being at risk, very little of that money actually gets stolen. What investigators have found is despite it being relatively easy to steal money online, the current fraud protections make it hard to steal a great deal of money; “The straw is only so big”, according to one government source. The running assumption is that online identity theft would be used for theft and there is a finite limit of the amount of theft that can actually take place. This has allowed financial institutions to build in this amount into their business models and simply write the cost of fraud and fraud protection into the price for their services.
OSA Editorial Comments:
We have to be aware of what is going on in the world, and just how careful you have to be everyday with your personal information! Start now, find out how to protect your ID.
Your Online Security Authority
Bill Wardell
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