The latest report, published by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, says that 25% of Americans who fall victim to identity theft find it a struggle to clear their name.
The survey, which polled close to 1,100 victims, indicated that 28% percent of victims have been unsuccessful in restoring their reputations, despite trying for more than a year on average. Citizens spend an average of 81 hours working to resolve their cases. Hence recovering from identity theft can be difficult, costly and stressful, but what is most alarming is that despite the time, money and personal duress victims go through, resolution is not always achieved.
More than half of all victims discovered the identity fraud themselves after noticing fraudulent credit card charges or withdrawn funds, the report indicated. It took respondents an average of five-and-a-half months after the first incident to discover the crime. Just 17 percent were notified by a creditor or bank of suspicious activity on their account.
The average sum of charges made to victims' accounts as a result of identity theft was $3,968, according to the survey. While most respondents were not held liable for the charges, 16 percent report that they had to shoulder some or all of the cost. Forty percent of respondents listed police, banks or credit issuers as difficult to work with when attempting to resolve the problem.
Recent confidential data leakages put in the risk of ID theft millions of Americans. The most significant incidents are: CardSystems Solutions (40 million records are compromised), CitiFinancial (4 million records) and Bank of America (1.2 million).
“It's really difficult to restore the reputation after ID theft. The only way is to keep confidence and persevere in resolving the problem in police and bank. As for financial institutions, they should be more serious in preventing confidential data leakages, because it causes insurmountable problems for their clients”, - commented Denis Zenkin, the Marketing Director of InfoWatch company.
Source: ZDNet
