Phonebusters, Canada's Anti-Fraud Call Centre, has long been one of my favourite organizations.  Their entire purpose is to raise awareness of and protect people from scams.  You know those horrible lottery scams?  It is doubtful that as many people would know about those if not for the people at Phonebusters.

I also like Phonebusters because they keep the best statistics on identity theft in Canada.  While they will never claim that all cases of identity theft are reported to Phonebusters (studies indicate that only 0.5% of cases of identity theft are actually reported to the centre), we need some way to measure a problem if we hope to solve the problem.

Here are some statistics from June, 2009:

Fewer cases of identity theft were reported in June than in May, but the total amount lost was significantly higher.  In May 2009, 1,072 people reported being defrauded out of $635,706.98.  In June 2009, only 984 people reported being victims of identity theft, but these people were defrauded out of $828,029.53.

So far in 2009, 6,696 Canadians have reported being victims of identity theft.  These people have been defrauded out of a total of $5,169,118.15!  These are intensely ugly numbers as they seem to indicate that identity fraud is one of the fastest growing crimes in all of Canada.

The McMaster study (which I have written many articles about - like this and this), argued that only 0.5% of identity theft victims reported the crime to Phonebusters.  If you apply that incidence to Phonebuster's annual numbers on identity theft, it would mean that over 1.3 million Canadians have been victims of identity theft so far in 2009.  Over an entire year, this means that there will be over 2.6 million victims in Canada in 2009.

Compare those numbers to the McMaster report, which indicated that there were 1.7 million victims in 2008 and you will see that identity fraud has increased by over 50%.  Granted, these are two separate studies, so there will be differences in both measurement and interpretation.  However, the numbers thus far seem to indicate that 2009 will be a record year for identity theft in Canada.

This is definitely not the kind of record that Canadians want to set.