800k identity theft cases in 2007, 23% of them involve credit cards

FTC logged about 800,000 consumer complaints about identity theft during 2007, of which 32% involved identity theft and 68% covered other types of fraud. Of the identity theft cases, only 23% involved a credit card account, and cases of unauthorized new accounts outnumbered misuse of existing accounts by two to one. Other categories involved using someone else’s name for a utilities account (18%), for employment (14%), for government benefits fraud (11%), loan fraud (5%) and other forms of bank fraud (13%).