Consumer Fraud in the US
March 20, 2008
The numbers are in. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Napa, Ca. is the worst place in the US for identity fraud and theft. This result is according to numbers for the year 2007. During that year, Napa residents filed consumer complaints of over 300 per 100,000 residents.
The residents of Napa should not feel alone however. There were 280 complaints filed per 100,000 residents for the town of Madera, Ca. as well. This is just a few shy of the Napa count. Consumers in Greeley, Co. were also among the top listed with 228 fraud complaints filed per 100,000 residents.
Surprisingly, on the state level it was California that topped the list but Arizona. Arizona reported 137 identity theft complaints for the past year and this made them the worst per-capita. California as a per-capita came in with 120 complaints of identity theft.
For general complaints of fraud, the numbers are very different. The town of Albany-Lebanon in Oregon came in at the top of the list for general fraud which includes all forms of fraud. At the state level, Colorado was the number one trouble spot. Washington and Missouri came in just behind. The state of California came in at 19.
The type of fraud that took place the most often was credit card fraud. This accounted for over twenty percent of the complaints that were filed. Not far behind credit card fraud were employee related fraud and then utility and phone fraud complaints. Each of these accounted for about eighteen percent of the cases filed.
Eleven percent of the cases filed involved some form of home shopping or mail order fraud. Not too surprising the next level of complaints involved sweepstakes and lottery type scams as well as internet service and foreign money order scams.