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£1.7 Billion? Why the ID Fraud Figures Don't Add Up02 February 2006 - The Home Office has eagerly announced that Identity fraud costs the country £1.7 billion a year - BUT you'll be disappointed if you were expecting crime statistics about how many people have been victims of identity fraud, and how much they lost, and about whether measures like chip & pin have had any effect, etc ,etc. Instead it's a few pages of cobbled-together guesstimates, (clearly designed to counter the high-profile heavy criticism that ID registration in recent weeks). Here's a sample quote: Money laundering - £395m
The overall size of money laundered in the UK is not known currently but is believed to be substantial. This cannot be attributed to any single organisation. No figures are available currently on the proportion of money laundering that relies on identity fraud.It is not possible to determine if the scale of this problem has changed since 2002. The figure from the original study has been included for illustrative purposes to help estimate any comparative changes to the overall cost of identity fraud since 2002.
Police Service - £1.73m
It is not possible to estimate the overall cost of identity fraud to the Police Service...
... and so on - read it for yourself So, not really a heavily researched serious look at identity fraud, after all, just some 'back of the envelope' arithmetic intended to help Ministers to say things like: Clearly, the criticisms about cost are getting to them - but what they don't seem to realise is that people concerned about much much more than money - loss of privacy and erosion of liberty are too high a price to pay! Good analysis from Silicon http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39156140,00.htm and SpyBlog http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2006/02/andy_burnhams_17_billon_identi.html |
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