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Online Fraud and Identity Theft

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Introduction:
Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes statistically according to the Federal Trade Commission. Roughly 27.3 million Americans have fallen victim to this form of theft/fraud. According to last year the loss of money for businesses and financial institutions are in the billions and with consumers out of pocket expenses has been about 5 billion dollars. "Identity theft" refers to crimes in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person's personal data (i.e., name, date of birth, social security number, driver's license number, and your financial identity— credit card, bank account and phone-card numbers) in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain (to obtain money or …show more content…

Fraud is a broad strokes definition; fraud is a deliberate misrepresentation which causes another person to suffer damages, usually monetary losses. Most people consider the act of lying to be fraudulent, but in a legal sense lying is only one small element of actual fraud. A salesman may lie about his name, eye color, place of birth and family, but as long as he remains truthful about the product he sells, he will not be found guilty of fraud. There must be a deliberate misrepresentation of the product's condition and actual monetary damages must occur. Online fraud is costing about 2.6 billion dollars a year and continues to grow at a rate of 700 million dollars a year. High fraud rates continue to plague electronic commerce Web sites, with criminals expected to steal $2.6 billion from online merchants this year, according to a new survey.
While that's an annual increase of $700 million, the percent increase is roughly equal to the increase in total Net sales, so rates of fraud stayed essentially the same -- about 2 percent of sales -- according to the survey, conducted by CyberSource Corp. As Shakespeare wrote "But he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him/And makes me poor indeed." - Shakespeare, Othello, act iii. Sc. 3.
The short answer is that identity theft is a crime. Identity theft and identity fraud are terms used to refer to all

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