Andrew Gilligan's "Gilligan on Monday" column in the Evening Standard seems to take weeks or months to appear in their online archives e.g. his article back in March about the saga documented by the Yorkshire Ranter blog regarding Viktor Bout, the illegal gun running airline operator, is now online, but was not for at least a couple of weeks after publication.
Today's two page article is illustrated by a large burning ID Card colour photo from the NO2ID demonstration outside the David Blunkett / IPPR event last November,
[captioned: "Burning issue: to try to stifle protests over their plans for identity cards, Tony Blair and Charles Clarke (pictured below) have relied on statistics that seem to bear little relation to reality],
another colour photo of Charles Clarke looking mean and shifty, and a black and white still from the Alistair McGowan Capital One credit card "identity theft" scaremongering ad campaign. Capital One have been spamming potential customers with junk mail for years, so one has to be sceptical about their attitude to data privacy and security.
Debunking the "£1.3 billion a year identity theft figure " has been done before, by the Law Society and even by Spy Blog:
"Identity Fraud" does NOT "cost the UK £1.3 billion a year"
However, Andrew Gilligan has the resources to get quotes and comments from most of the industries or departments which contributed guesstimates to the Cabinet Office document " Identity Fraud - a study" published in July 2002 (241kb .pdf file) which the Home Office has been shamelessly hyping ever since, without commissioning any updated guesses or actual quantitative research themselves in the intervening period.
It is important that this article is more widely read outside of London, before the Second Reading of the Identity cards Bill on the 28th of this month i.e. in just over a week:
"Evening Standard, Monday 20th June 2005, page 16 & 17
Gilligan on MondayRevealed: how Blair is playing the fear card
Thanks to a Government campaign and an over-the-top TV advert, we are being led to believe that we are all at the mercy of identity-theft fraudsters. But the £1.3 billion figures for Britain's 'fastest-growing crime' just don't add up.
In times past, the character we loved to hate from the TV adverts was no more sinister than Captain Birds Eye. Now, in a more fearful Britain, it's the Identity Thief. For the past four months, thanks to the credit-card company Capital One, this sinister, black clad figure has taken up seemingly permanent residency in the ad-breaks.There he is in the back of a taxi, explaining how he's set up a mobile phone account in your name, used it to do some deals with the Russian mafia, and got you into trouble with Special Branch. That's him in a Vegas hotel suite. Hoovering up the champers and smirking that he's managed to travel the world as you.
There's only one problem with these spine-chilling depictions of what Capital One calls "the UK's fastest growing crime". As the company admitted to the Standard, they are "not based on reality". You don't need to hijack someone else's name to ring up the Mob: you can buy a pay-as-you-go phone without giving any name at all. And to travel the world, you need something called a passport, which is issued only after quite stringent checks.
"Identity Theft", mainly involving credit fraudulently taken out in your name, is indisputably real, and thousands of real people do fall victim to it every year. Some suffer serious inconvenience, and a tiny minority suffer actual financial loss. (The vast majority of losses are fully refunded to the victim - not something the adverts bother to tell you). But the problem is currently being played up wildly out of proportion to its seriousness. Identity theft is not, in fact, the UK's fastest growing crime. But it is one of the UK's fastest-growing areas of hype.
"We cannot stand still in the knowledge of the threats we all face from identity fraud," said the Home Office minister Baroness Scotland.
"Estimates show that it takes the average victim of identity theft 300 hours to put their records straight," said her former colleague, Beverly Hughes. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke, has said many times in recent months that ID fraud "now costs the UK more than £1.3 billion every year"
Last month, that well-known master of understatement, the Prime Minister, casually upped the figure by a billion or two, telling MPs that "abuse of identity costs this country billions of pounds a year".
It is not difficult to understand why ministers have seized on this alleged epeidemic with such relish. Exactly like Capital One, they've got a piece of plastic which they badly want to flog us. The Identity Cards Bill is about to start its journey through Parliament. the terrorism and illegal immigration justifications for this hugely controversial scheme have started to unravel (the cards will not cover visitors or new entrants to the country, nor will they pick up terrorists already resident here).
But at least identity fraud might seem like a cast-iron problem that the cards could actually tackle. According to press reports, ministers are preparing to make it their principal justification.
Over the past six months, all the Government's statistics and claims - the £1.3 billion cost, the 300 hours to fix your records, the fastest-growing crime - have been repeated in good faith, dozens of times by newspapers and broadcasters throughout the country. Unfortunately every single one of them can be shown to be false.
The £1.3 billion figure comes from a Cabinet Office study in 2002, still the most recent and current research on the problem. Annex B of the study, towards the back, shows how the numbers were totted up.
According to the report, £370 million of the total is shown as reported by APACS, the bank clearing service for plastic cards and cheques. APACS says its real figure for identity fraud on plastic cards in 2002 was actually only £20.6 million - little more than a twentieth of the amount claimed by the Government. Even last year, it says, the figure was only £36.9 million.
"Their definition of identity theft clearly differs from our definition," said Mark Bowerman, spokesman for APACS. "Our interpretation is that ID theft must mean actual theft of an identity, and not just theft of, for example, a card."
A further £250 million of the ID fraud is shown as occurring in the insurance industry - an astonishing quarter of total losses.
"I'm not sure where that figure comes from. It's not from us. I'm not sure where they make that connection," says a puzzled Malcolm Tarling, spokesman for the Association of British Insurers. "Insurance fraud tends to be people claiming in their real names for false losses. ID fraud is not a particularly big problem in the insurance sector."
Then, £215 million is shown as due to a complicated scam called "missing trader intra-community" (MITC) fraud". This involved goods being shifted between various EU countries to avoid paying VAT. But Paul Matthews, a spokesman for Customs and Excise, which polices the VAT system says: "We wouldn't normally describe MITC fraud as ID fraud."
Another figure, £395 million, is shown as due to money-laundering. Again, says Mr Matthews: "Not all money-laundering is ID fraud. It can be as straightforward as somebody investing the money in a business, or a property, or whatever. I haven't found anything to source that particular figure in that report. It's difficult to see where they've got it from."
Yet another sum, £62.5 million is shown as reported by CIFAS, the main fraud policeman for the credit industry. CIFAS say this figure does seem about right, but says there is likely to be "some double counting" with the APACS figure.
A further £36 million is shown as the cost to the immigration service of processing immigrants arriving in the country with false documents - something which is, of course, not a fraud at all.
Stripping out all the mis-directions, exaggerations and distortions, we are left with a few genuine items - £35 million of identity-related benefit fraud (one per cent of the total of all benefit fraud) and less than £1 million due to "NHS tourism", foreigners claiming free treatment they're not entitled to. Both of these will be underestimates, but not vastly so. And thus the Government's supposed £1.3 billion tally of identity fraud falls to no more than £150 million, just over a tenth of the claimed figure.
Even if identity cards were able to end all those frauds - something that even the Government does not claim - the cost of setting up the cards is estimated by the Home Office itself at a minimum of £5.8 billion and the annual running cost at £85 million a year. The sums, in short, do not add up.
But, of course, the Cabinet Office report is three years old and ID fraud is the "fastest-growing crime in Britain" - isn't it ?
It's certainly true that it soared in the early years of this decade, and those are the numbers that tend to get quoted. But the latest figures from CIFAS, covering credit and credit-card fraud show that cases of classic ID theft - where someone is a victim of impersonation - are now actually falling. And the rise in the other type of ID fraud, where a false identity is created, has levelled off dramatically.
"As a proportion of plastic-card fraud, it's quite a small problem," says Beverly Young, head of training and compliance at CIFAS. (About 7 per cent of the total, in fact.) "There are indications of progress. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's pretty encouraging. Consumers are getting more aware of the problem and that has had an impact."
And what of the Home Office minister's extraordinary claims that it will take the "average victim" of ID theft 300 hours - an astonishing eight-and-a-half full-time working weeks to sort out his credit rating ?
What CIFAS actually says is that this applies only to a tiny minority of "the most severe cases", where there has been a total identity hijack involving perhaps 20 or 30 lenders. The Home Office has since quietly amended its claim, but the original mis-statement is still being quoted by newspapers and companies, including Capital One, to this day.
Perhaps influenced by these distortions, CIFAS, once a leading supporter of ID cards, now seem to have turned rather lukewarm about the Government's grand design. "It's very hard to say that ID cards will prevent identity theft," says Young. "It could have some benefits - that's as far as we'll go."
However, if you are worried about identity theft, there are rather more effective and cheaper safeguards than an ID card. For £11.75 you can ask CIFAS for "protective registration", which means they will carry out tough extra checks on any new application in your name. For £45, you can sign up for monitoring with a credit reference agency such as Experian, so you'll be alerted the moment anyone tries to apply for credit as you.
Identity fraud, it seems clear, has become yet another part of the Government's now time-honoured practice of the stoking of fear. Just as with weapons of mass destruction or ricin plots, we have seen the same lethal combination of a genuine (but exaggerated) threat, dodgy data, credulous journalists and a sinister new buzzword to describe things that have been going on for years.
ID fraud most certainly exists. But political fraud also comes into it."
"Estimates show that it takes the average victim of identity theft 300 hours to put their records straight," said her former collegue, Beverly Hughes. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke, has said many times in recent months that ID fraud "now costs the UK more than £1.3 billion every year"
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I've been a victim where someone registered a van to my address, and went around running up speeding, parking and congestion charge fines galour.
The major problem with fixing it all wasn't the DVLC, it was local councils, and the congestion charge. None of these organisations have telephone lines where you can ring up and report the problem by talking to a person. Instead you get recorded messages, several minutes long, probably on premium phone lines. None of the options fit.
The Government's proposed ID Card would have been of no help at all in such a case, nor with "cloned number plate" congestion charge frauds..
good work mark...are you going to do anything on the arrested 'flatmate' of an alleged suicide bomber???
love cw
Hopefully not ! Who knows at this stage ?
It is all a big secret, hidden by spin , hype and false reporting, as usual - there must be people who on hearing the initial reports, still think that a "suicide bomber" has actually been arrested in Manchester.
If there is real evidence against this person that he was involved in "directing" or "training" or "fund raising" for terrorist purposes, then he should be tried in a UK court.
If this all a prelude to another dubious extradition request or if the person arrested is only peripherally involved by association with the alleged suicide bomber in Iraq back in February, then that might be a different matter.
Back to tthe Evening Standard article, it will be interesting to see if it is mentioned in the forthcoming Second Reading debate on th eidentity Cards Bill, or if the publication of the ful London School of Economics report the day before will have more influence with MPs.
It is not identity theft that is the problem, but simple fraudulent online use of credits cards. We run a small company trading both from shopping centres and from our website http://zolushka.co.uk
We find that the credit card fraud is virtually non existent at out physical shops and stalls, but about 5% of our websites orders are basically fraudulent or part of a scam. It wastes so much of our time and profits!
I was concerned about the possibility of off-shoring the work, and now I am proved right if this is anything to go by:
Population database will move to India
Protests at offshore move for lists of births, marriages and deaths
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1512374,00.html
How can the proposed National Identity Register ever be secure, if the database of one of the primary "biographical footprint" data sources is outsourced to India or any other country outside the direct legal jurisdiction of the UK ?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/23/indian_call_centre_fraud_probe/
"The Sun exposes UK ID theft racket at Indian call centre
By John Leyden
The Register
Published Thursday 23rd June 2005 10:13 GMT
Update An undercover reporter was able to buy the details thousands of UK
banking accounts, password particulars and credit cards numbers from
crooked call centre workers in India, The Sun reports.
The paper says one of its journalists bought details of 1,000 UK banking
customers from an IT worker in Delhi for £4.25 each. He was also able to
buy the numbers of credit cards and account passwords. An unnamed security
expert hired by the paper verified that the details were genuine. The
information sold could be readily exploited by ID thieves to apply for
credit cards or loans under assumed identities or to simply loot
compromised accounts. The call centre worker bragged that he could sell up
to 200,000 account details each month.
The Sun handed over a dossier on its investigation to the City of London
Police. In a statement, the City of London Police said: "Unfortunately we
have no jurisdiction to prosecute this in the UK. However we have passed
information through Interpol to the Indian authorities and will be working
with them to secure the prosecution of this individual.".
Amicus, the union, said the case highlighted possible data protection risks
about moving financial services overseas. "Companies that have offshore
jobs need to reflect on their decision and the assumption that cost savings
benefiting them and their shareholders outweigh consumer confidentiality
and confidence," Dave Fleming, senior finance officer, told the BBC."
Enjoyed your take on ID theft from the U.K. and the excellent documentation of facts. Thought you might be interested in a concept I have originated and am promoting here in the U.S.
One of the major sources of identity theft in the United States is unsolicited credit card mailings. The ultimate junk mail. Mail Monitor, a junk mail tracking company, reported 5.23 billion credit card offers in 2004. The FTC provided confirmation of the problem in early 2005, reporting ID theft right at the top of consumer complaints.
There is an answer. Pass federal legislation giving consumers 100% control over their name and personal data. Let them opt-in, rather than having to opt-out, of receiving junk mail. While eliminating identity theft, we can also force the junk mailers to share in the sale of our names and private information, amounting to over $4 billion each year.
Bold, original, even outrageous…but a workable plan.
Jack E. Dunning
So when Members of Parliament ask the Home Office about the basis for these "identity fraud" claims, what sort of answer do you think they get ?
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm050628/text/50628w20.htm
"28 Jun 2005 : Column 1458W—continued
Identity Fraud/Theft
Sir Paul Beresford: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how much of his estimate of the total cost of identity fraud constitutes (a) credit card fraud and (b) identity theft. [5839]
Andy Burnham [holding answer 20 June 2005]: The Cabinet Office study published in 2002 estimated that the minimum cost of identity fraud to the economy is in excess of £1.3 billion per annum. The study estimates that £370 million of the overall figure is attributable to credit card fraud. This includes use of counterfeit cards, cards lost or stolen and card not present fraud. All of the costs estimated in the Cabinet Office study are associated with identity theft. Losses, however, are not generally incurred until a criminal has obtained a victims personal details through identity theft and used them to commit fraud.
David Davis: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what (a) methodology and (b) sources were used for the calculation of the cost of identity theft in Appendix B of Identity Fraud: A Study, of July 2002. [6916]
Mr. Charles Clarke: The Cabinet Office formed a cross-departmental team to estimate the cost of identity fraud to the UK economy. The study involved examination of direct financial losses, such as those incurred when false identities are used to fraudulently obtain credit. It also examined the costs incurred by enforcement and other agencies that encounter individuals who use false identities to obtain services fraudulently. This included costing the resources needed to carry out investigations. The sources that were used for the calculation of the cost of identity fraud were, HM Customs and Excise (now HM Revenue and Customs), Department of Health, Department of Work and Pensions, Immigration Service, Association of Payment Clearing Services, insurance companies and CIFAS, the UK's Fraud Prevention Service."
Read the transcript of the Andrew Gilligan article above, and decide if the Home Office is being evasive.
Where is the Home Office sponsored research into this area ? Andy Burnham is the Home Office Minister in charge of Research, why doesn't he commission some up-to-date, quantitative, studies ?