July 2007
Recording and Reporting Identity Theft
According to Federal Trade Commission research, older persons and those less educated are likely to take longer to report identify theft and are less likely to report it at all. This research also suggests that the longer it takes to discover the crime and report it to the relevant authority, the greater the loss and suffering of the victim, and, from a criminal justice perspective, the poorer the chance of successful disposition of the case. In contrast to FTC's extensive database of consumer complaints and victimization, the criminal justice system lacks any such information related to identity theft. No criminal justice agency maintains a national database of the number of identity theft cases reported to it or those disposed of by arrest and subsequent prosecution. The FBI and the U.S. Secret Service have reported numbers of cases of identity theft that they have investigated in recent years, but these number only in the hundreds, and without State, multiagency, and local data, no means is currently available to determine the amount of identity theft confronted by the criminal justice system. Criminal justice authorities, especially local police, have been thwarted in recording and reporting identity theft crimes by three significant issues:
|
||
Office of Justice Programs · Innovation · Partnerships · Safer Neighborhoods · www.ojp.usdoj.gov | ||