The report builds on a study from 2002, which claimed that
identity fraud was then costing the country £1.3 billion.
"These findings confirm the sheer scale of the threat posed by
identity fraud to individual citizens, private companies, and
Government bodies alike,” said Home Office Minister Andy Burnham,
yesterday.
"One way we can reduce the potential for identity fraud is to
introduce a national identity card, backed by a National Identity
Register, using biometric technology to crack down on multiple
identities and secure personal data on behalf of the individual,”
he added.
The report was released just in time to fuel debate ahead of the
return to the Commons of the ID Card Bill next week. However, the
strategy appears to have backfired. The Home Office figures are
being challenged.
It appears that the figure of £1.7 billion includes £395 million
supposedly lost to ‘money laundering’ – a figure that the Home
Office has now admitted is only ‘illustrative’.
It also includes £500 million supposedly lost as a result of
“plastic cards being used by criminals pretending to be the
rightful owner or by criminals using a fictitious identity.”
But payments association APACS, which supplied this figure, told
Silicon.com that the total of £500 million includes losses incurred
as a result of card theft and other offences that it considers to
be separate from identity theft. The true figure for ID theft
relating to credit and debit cards, said APACS, was just under £37
million.
"On the one hand the Government's figures are full of holes. On
the other they are peddling claptrap about the effectiveness of an
ID card in combating identity fraud,” warned Lib Dem Home Affairs
spokesman Alistair Carmichael. "It is impossible to see how an ID
card would reduce credit card fraud unless we are going to be
expected to show our ID card every time we make a purchase."
Conservative spokesman Edward Garnier predicted that ID cards
would increase the likelihood of identity theft.
“Instead of playing on people’s fears about ID fraud the
Government should take the £15 billion the ID card system would
cost and spend it on effective measures that will actually reduce
fraud and combat terrorism,” he said.
According to Phil Booth, National Coordinator of campaign group
NO2ID, “We hope that Parliament will look at these new figures very
carefully. The minister doesn’t say exactly how biometric ID cards
are supposed to prevent fraud, or how much. Do the Home Office
intend us to be scanned or fingerprinted wherever we go?”
“Andy Burnham’s assertion that biometrics will prevent criminals
registering multiple identities have already been contradicted by
the head of the ID card programme, who was reported as saying that
– due to difficulties with ‘one-to-many’ matching – criminals will
merely have to work hard to get two identities and work very hard
to get three,” he added.
On Wednesday the group issued a warning that the security of the
Dutch biometric passport, which uses the same RFID technology as
intended for UK ID cards, has been cracked using data 'skimmed'
from a distance of around 10 metres.
"Identity fraud will be made much worse by ID cards, not
better,” said Booth. “Numbering and indexing every person in the
country on a huge central Register, then making us use cards
designed to broadcast not only this number but our personal data,
including our biometrics, will be an absolute bonanza for identity
thieves and fraudsters."
