The Federal Trade Commission released its annual summary of consumer complaints on March 3, 2017. For the first time, imposter scam complaints surpassed identity theft to take the second most common category of consumer complaints.
In 2016, the Consumer Sentinel Network collected more than 3.1 million complaints, which the FTC then sorted into the 30 top complaint categories. You can read the agencies new Data Book, titled Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book for Jan.-Dec. 2016, here.
The FTC credits the rise in imposter scams to an increase in people posing to be from the government.
“Imposter scams come in many varieties, but work the same way: a scammer pretends to be someone trustworthy, such as a government official or computer technician to convince a consumer to send money. Imposter scams also topped the list of complaints from military consumers followed by identity theft complaints,” according to an FTC press release about the summary.
Thomas Pahl, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, calls the imposter scams a “serious and growing problem.”
A few key findings from the report:
- Identity theft complaints declined from 16 percent in 2015 to 13 percent in 2016.
- Of those, 29 percent of 2016 consumers reported their data was used to commit tax fraud.
- There was a jump in those consumers who reported that their stolen data was used for credit card fraud; this figure rose from nearly 16 percent in 2015 to more than 32 percent in 2016.
The top five states for fraud and other complaints were:
- Florida
- Georgia
- Michigan
- Texas
- Nevada
The top five states for identity theft were:
- Michigan
- Florida
- Delaware
- California
- Illinois
According to the release:
“The Consumer Sentinel Network’s secure online database is currently available to more than 2,300 individual users in civil and criminal law enforcement agencies across the country and abroad. Agencies use the data to research cases, identify victims and track possible targets. Although non-governmental organizations may contribute data to the database, only law enforcement agencies can access the database.”
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