Inside Bay Area – “We are not saying (online access and data breaches) are not significant factors,” said James Van Dyke, Javelin’s president and founder. “But the point is that it has really been overblown. I think it is to the detriment of consumers to focus exclusively on these electronic methods of communication. Criminal don’t have a (bias) toward technology. They will use any channel that works.”

That’s why consumers need to take steps to prevent identity theft, whether it be not mailing paper checks in the offline world or making sure your computer’s anti-virus software is current in the online world, he said. It’s also crucial that consumers monitor their financial account activity to determine it they have become a victim of identity theft.

(See breakouts for more tips on how to prevent identity theft and what to do if your identity is stolen.)

The annual survey continues a five-year trend that shows identity theft dropping in the United States as more online security procedures are put in place and consumers take more preventive measures. Last year, there were an estimated 8.1 million identity theft cases, or 3.58 percent of adults, resulting in $45 billion in fraud, compared to 8.4 million cases, or 3.84 percent of adults, resulting in $51 billion in fraud the previous year. But it’s not all good news for consumers. Fewer people who were victims of identity theft could say how their information was stolen: 35 percent in the 2008 survey compared to 42 percent in 2007.

Just what’s responsible for the decline in knowing how the crime happened is not clear, said Van Dyke.

“We could speculate but we just can’t know for certain,” he said. “Certainly we are getting increases in reports of data breaches but there are still a lot of data breaches that never get reported.”

The low-tech means through which Titus became a victim of identity theft has a much lower profile than the high-tech online methods such as phishing, or a computer data breach. Phishing is when identity thieves trick consumers into revealing financial information by sending a fake e-mail reporting there is a problem with a financial account.

Unlike Titus, most identity theft victims don’t know how their personal information was stolen. Read Full Article