Worst type of identity theft in decline; net scam complaints rise

• Setting identity theft aside, Internet-related scams rose to 53 percent of consumers' fraud complaints filed with the agency in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2002.
• Such fraud accounted for 39 percent of all consumer complaints filed with the FTC, followed by Internet auction fraud, which made up 16 percent of total complaints, and shop-at-home and catalog sales with 8 percent.
• Not counting ID theft cases, 35 percent of the fraud cases were initiated by an e-mail message, consumers reported, while 22 percent started at a Web site.
• (Consumers usually report ID theft before they know the full extent of their monetary loss, the agency said.)
• "We use these complaints every single day to help identify and target our cases.
• Nevertheless, a separate survey recently found that the steep rise of identity theft cases may be leveling off.
• According to the FTC, the most difficult to detect and often most expensive identity-theft cases -- where entirely new credit accounts are created based on a victim's identity -- declined as a percentage of ID theft complaints.
• New account fraud was about 17 percent of all ID theft cases reported in 2004, down from about 19 percent in 2003 and 24 percent in 2002.
• But other types of ID fraud increased: The percentage of complaints about electronic fund-transfer scams, mainly due to the theft of debit cards, grew to almost 7 percent of complaints in 2004, from 3 percent just two years earlier.
• The metropolitan areas with the highest reported per-capita rates of ID theft were Phoenix/Scottsdale, with 182.2 complaints per 100,000 people; Riverside/San Bernardino, Calif., with 166.6; and Las Vegas/Paradise, with 163.8.
• Andrea Coombes is a reporter for MarketWatch in San Francisco.