U.S. Identity Theft in 2021: Adapting and Evolving

Announced today, GIACT (a Refinitiv company) released its annual report, developed by Aite-Novarica, on identity theft in 2021. According to the report, 25% of U.S. consumers were impacted by identity theft in 2021. The report’s findings show sustained high levels of identity theft – including application fraud and account takeover – that have victimized consumers along with virtually every type of financial product, commercial platform and government support.

The report also found that payment channels including peer-to-peer (P2P) and buy now, pay later (BNPL) have also increasingly come under attack. While application fraud and account takeover continue to mainly target credit cards, the second most common channel for ATO was P2P (experienced by 25% of ATO victims) and the fifth most common channel for application fraud was BNPL (experienced by 23% of application fraud victims).