The Associated Press just reported on November 28th 2007 the results of a survey done by the Federal Trade Commission, the results the FTC came up with stated that the occurrence of ID theft was down 16 percent, from an anticipated 9.9 million victims to 8.3 for people over the age of 18, of course a few consumer advocacy groups disputed their findings stating that it was difficult to get a precise handle on the number of victims due to a number of factors one of them is that people don’t often know what exactly is in their credit report.
one of the reasons given for the FTC survey understating the actual numbers, was that the conclusion is not statistically significant since it was a phone survey where a small sample was used, another reason was that a separate survey was done by the Gartner Group using the same research firm McLean VA. based Synovate. The difference was in the fact that Gartner’s survey used a web based data collection method that does not account for non web users so it’s results should be statistically be lower.
The Gartner survey showed that the number of victims of Identity Theft actually rose from 10 million to 15 million...