I see that Spyblog has picked up on the announcement about ID fraud floating about the news yesterday.
Identity fraud affects 1.8 million Britons every year, costing £2.7bn in the process, researcher claimed today.
All of this sounds horribly familiar. Haven’t we been here before? As Spyblog points out, this time around there is no attempt to dissect the figures.
Naite that there is not even the discredited breakdown of guesstimate figures into categories such as “missing trader intra-community” (MITC) fraud” or “telecommunication” or “money laundering” or “insurrance fraud” which were abused in precious Government headline figures for “the annual cost of “identity fraud / theft” in the UK.
Perhaps, because as was pointed out the last time, many of the crimes put down to identity theft were nothing of the sort. So another announcement from the ministry of made up statistics, it seems.
Now interestingly, the figure has again risen somewhat dramatically. The first time we heard it, it was £1.3bn, which then rose to £1.7bn and now it’s jumped by another £1bn all in the space of about five years. A positive epidemic. What are they doing about it?
if you were to actually believe this “2.7 billion pounds a year” figure, then you should be asking why the precious Labour government and current Coalition one, have utterly failed in their anti-fraud policies, despite unprecedented national and international financial snooping powers.
The answer is, quite simply, I don’t believe it. It is the same tired hogwash dusted down, given a lick of emulsion and shown off to the world as the new, improved model.
The key weasel words comes from the report.
£2.7billion cost. Source: NFA. £1.9bn is estimated to be direct losses and £0.8bn is indirect losses, that is costs incurred by organisations preventing, detecting and investigating ID fraud as well as costs incurred by individuals trying to resolve instances of ID theft. This figure does not include the cost to the UK resulting from newly created fictitious identities or from corporate ID fraud.
So it doesn’t include any new identity theft at all, which is pretty pointless. In reality, as Spyblog points out, this is an evidence free assertion.
I can’t help wondering if it has anything to do with this.
As the government acts to scrap the identity card scheme, it has already begun work on a replacement.
Or working with a replacement, as the case may be. Because the alternative to megalomaniacal Labour’s flagship Big Brother project is not a government project at all. It is private.
And its based, appropriately, in Bethnal Green. Home of the Libertines.
That was the birth place last week of Mydex, the Community Interest Company that calls itself the world’s first personal data store.
The Cabinet Office, DWP, and Brent, Croydon and Windsor councils have joined the pilot. It will do a form of federated ID management. It’s what will get after Labour’s ID scheme is dismantled.
Cynic, moi? Shome mishtake, shurely…
Of course, if Mydex is entirely voluntary with no coercion whatsoever, I don’t have a problem with it.