Identity Fraud Statistics: What the Public Numbers Count and How to Read Them

Anyone who writes a business case for identity verification meets the same slide: a large number with the words identity fraud on it. The number usually comes from a public report, and the report usually counts something other than what the slide suggests. This guide takes the latest figures from four public sources and one qualitative assessment, states for each the year, the unit and the definition, and then shows why the figures cannot be added together or set against each other.

It reports what the sources say. It does not estimate a global total, and it does not claim that any product reduces any of these figures.

The four sources at a glance

Nothing in this table is a count of fraudulent onboarding attempts. That is the first thing to remember, and the sections below return to it.

United States: reports to the Federal Trade Commission

The Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book for 2024, published in March 2025, is the latest edition we could retrieve from the agency's site. Sentinel took in more than 6.47 million reports in 2024, and the agency sorts them into fraud, identity theft and other reports. It reports 2.6 million fraud reports, which it puts at 40 percent of all reports. It reports 1.1 million identity theft reports, which it puts at 18 percent. The Data Book gives the exact total of identity theft reports in 2024 as 1,135,291. The most frequently reported identity theft type was misuse of an existing credit card or an application for a new one, with 449,032 reports.

The definitions matter more than the totals. The Data Book is based on unverified reports filed by consumers, and the agency says the data is not based on a consumer survey. Sentinel also includes reports filed with other federal, state, local and international law enforcement agencies and with organisations such as the Better Business Bureau and a technology company's cybercrime centre. Consumers can report more than one type of identity theft, and the Data Book says 14 percent of identity theft reports in 2024 included more than one type. It also warns that the total number of reports for 2024 would likely change in the following months, because some contributors transfer their complaints after the end of the year. For dollar losses, the agency says its calculations use reports in which consumers indicated they lost between 1 and 999,999 dollars.

Two lessons follow. A count of reports is not a count of victims, because one person can file several reports and one report can describe several types. And a count is a snapshot of a database that is still being filled.

United States: complaints to the FBI

The 2025 annual report of the Internet Crime Complaint Center states that the center received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025. It reports 20.877 billion dollars in losses for the year, a 26 percent increase in losses from 2024. The report defines identity theft as someone wrongfully obtaining and using personally identifiable information in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain.

For identity theft in particular, the report lists 31,675 complaints in 2025, against 21,403 in 2024 and 19,778 in 2023. It lists reported losses for identity theft of 185,832,657 dollars in 2025, 174,354,745 dollars in 2024 and 126,203,809 dollars in 2023.

Compare this with the Federal Trade Commission figure. The commission counts about 1.1 million identity theft reports for 2024, and the FBI center counts 21,403 identity theft complaints for the same year. Both are real counts. They differ because the first collects consumer reports on many consumer matters from many contributors, while the second collects complaints about internet-enabled crime, and each has its own category rules. The two should never be added.

Category rules also split identity-related harm. The 2025 FBI report lists separate crime types for personal data breach, with 67,456 complaints, for data breach, with 3,963 complaints, for SIM swap, with 971 complaints, and for identity theft, with 31,675 complaints. A reader who takes only the identity theft line sees one part of the picture.

United Kingdom: cases filed to the National Fraud Database

Cifas, the UK fraud prevention service whose members file cases to a shared database, published its report for 2025 in March 2026. It says more than 444,000 cases were recorded to the National Fraud Database in 2025, the highest number in a single year and a 6 percent increase on 2024. It says over 242,000 identity fraud cases were filed, accounting for 54 percent of all fraud-risk cases recorded in 2025. It reports that this was a 3 percent decrease on 2024. It reports more than 78,000 facility, or account, takeover cases, accounting for 18 percent of all filings and a 6 percent increase on 2024. It reports that unauthorised SIM swaps were up 38 percent. It says identity fraud cases involving bank accounts exceeded 63,000, a 10 percent uplift, and that insurance cases rose 26 percent to more than 16,000. It reports more than 106,000 misuse of facility cases, a 43 percent increase compared with 2024. It reports over 22,000 cases recorded following the introduction of a new money mule filing category.

Cifas interprets the fall in identity fraud cases as a shift in tactics, not a reduction in harm, because criminals increasingly move towards account takeover. A director of intelligence at Cifas adds that rising cases reflect both the scale of offending and improved reporting by organisations. Those two sentences are the whole lesson about administrative data. A filing count moves when criminals change behaviour, when members change how they file, when a category is introduced, and when membership changes. The new money mule category in the same report is an example of the second kind of change.

England and Wales: the crime survey

The Office for National Statistics publishes the Crime Survey for England and Wales, based on interviews, and describes it as its preferred source for fraud against individuals and households. For the year ending March 2026 it estimates 4.5 million fraud incidents, with no statistically significant change compared with 4.2 million incidents in the previous year's survey. It estimates 3.8 million fraud victims, a 10 percent increase compared with 3.4 million victims the previous year. It puts the prevalence of fraud, which it defines as the proportion of all people who were victims in the previous 12 months, at 7.8 percent. The denominator is narrower than the words suggest: the survey asks people aged 16 years and over who live in households in England and Wales, so the incident, victim and prevalence figures all refer to that population and not to children, to people outside households, or to the rest of the United Kingdom. Within the survey's fraud, it reports a 15 percent increase in bank and credit account fraud, to around 2.8 million incidents. Its definition of that category is falsely obtaining or using personal bank or payment card details to carry out fraudulent transactions, which can involve using a false identity.

The same bulletin explains why recorded fraud is a weaker measure. It says recorded fraud and computer misuse are not reliable indicators of overall volume or trends, as many victims do not report incidents to the reporting service. It adds that data on fraud against businesses and organisations come from Cifas and UK Finance reports, which cover only their member organisations, and that membership changes over time, affecting comparability. It records that a new national reporting system, Report Fraud, was launched by the City of London Police on 4 December 2025, and that recorded cybercrime and fraud data are not presented in the March 2026 bulletin.

A qualitative source: Europol

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) publishes an annual internet organised crime threat assessment, and the 2026 edition is the one used here. Its methodology states that the criminal intelligence it uses is related to major investigations supported by Europol in 2025, and that the collected data consists primarily of qualitative information. It does not give a count of identity fraud events, and it should not be quoted as if it did. It does make two points relevant to verification: that the smartphone is the primary means to circumvent know-your-customer checks, and that online fraudsters have learned to abuse the rapid customer onboarding model of neo-banks, which places pressure on KYC mechanisms. These are assessments by an agency about criminal methods.

Why the numbers disagree

Put the sources side by side and four differences explain nearly every gap.

1. The unit. A report, a complaint, a case, an incident and a victim are different things. A single fraud can produce several of them, or none.
2. The population. Consumers, victims, member organisations and household samples are different populations, and the countries differ too.
3. The definition. The FBI definition of identity theft turns on wrongful use of personally identifiable information. The Cifas category is a filing category used by members. The ONS category is a type of fraud described from the victim's interview. The sources do not use one definition.
4. The mechanics. Reports are revised, categories are renamed, reporting systems change, and members join or leave. The Federal Trade Commission itself says that in 2024 some categories were renamed, and some subcategories were renamed, retired or consolidated.

When two numbers disagree, ask which of the four differs before asking which is right.

A worked example

Suppose a slide says that identity fraud is falling in the United Kingdom and rising in the United States. The first half rests on the Cifas count of identity fraud cases filed by its members, which fell between 2024 and 2025. The second half rests on the count of identity theft complaints to the FBI center, which rose over the same two years. Neither source supports the sentence as written. The Cifas figure counts cases filed by member organisations under their filing categories, and Cifas itself says the fall reflects a shift in tactics towards account takeover, not a reduction in harm. The FBI figure counts complaints from people who chose to report internet-enabled crime to a US agency. The countries, the units, the filers and the definitions all differ, so the two movements cannot be set against each other.

The survey adds a third direction for a related category. The Crime Survey estimates an increase in bank and credit account fraud, which is a type of fraud described from the victim's side and not a count of filings by organisations. It may be consistent with the shift Cifas describes, but the survey does not say so, and a careful writer does not say it for the survey. A better slide would carry two separate statements, each with its own source, unit and year, and would say plainly that they measure different things.

Questions for anyone who quotes a statistic to you

• Which source, which year, and which edition of that source?
• What is the unit: reports, complaints, cases, incidents or victims?
• Who files, and does the filer have an incentive or a rule that shapes the count?
• Has the category been renamed, split or introduced since the previous year?
• Is the number a share of something, and if so what is the denominator?
• Does the source itself warn about comparability, as the Federal Trade Commission and the Office for National Statistics do?

A checklist before you quote a number

• State the year and the unit. Write complaints to the FBI center in a named year, not identity theft in general.
• Quote the definition once. One sentence is enough.
• Never add or divide across sources. A share computed from two sources has no meaning.
• Separate counts from losses. A rise in complaints and a rise in reported losses are different findings.
• Name the direction and the reason, if the source gives one. Cifas gives a reason for the fall in identity fraud cases; use it with attribution or leave it out.
• Say what the number does not measure. None of these sources measures attacks on a verification step.

What a buyer can actually use

The public numbers give context, not a baseline. They can show which products and sectors attract identity fraud in a given year, as the Cifas split by bank accounts and insurance does. They can show that the headline category is not the only one that matters, as the shift to account takeover shows. They cannot say how many fraudulent applications reach your door, how many of them a given check stops, or how many pass.

For that you need your own measurements: attempts by channel, decisions by reason, cases later found fraudulent, and the time it took to find them. Track them with definitions that you write down, in the way a good source states its own. The article on how to read a face recognition evaluation applies the same discipline to accuracy claims, and the buyer guide for liveness vendors applies it to attack-detection claims.

Where this sits in a verification flow

A flow built on NeuroVision KYC places the identity steps in one session: document, selfie, liveness and face match, with the scenario assembled in an editor. Document anti-fraud checks, covering screen photos, photocopies, printouts, glued photos, drawn-on elements, erasures, edited images and logical data errors, are included in every package. Deepfake and face-swap detection works inside the selfie and liveness steps. This article does not state that these steps reduce any of the figures above.

To see how these steps look in your own scenario, contact the team.

Sources

All sources were fetched on 27 October 2026.

• Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, US Federal Trade Commission, March 2025.
• 2025 IC3 Annual Report, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center.
• Fraudscape 2026: Fraud cases hit record highs as criminals adapt and scale, Cifas, 12 March 2026.
• Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2026, Office for National Statistics.
• Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) 2026, Europol.