UK.gov inflates ID theft risk: ID-card selling bunkum
John Leyden / The register | February 4 2006
The UK government has come out with yet another questionable
study to support its obsessive bent to impose ID cards on the British public.
Once again, ID fraud figures as the reason why Brits need expensive biometric
proofs of identity.
A Home Office study claims ID fraud costs Britain £1.7bn.
But most of these losses have either been overstated or represent nothing
to do with ID fraud, an investigation by Silicon.com has discovered.
Figures for the theft of a credit or debit card,
missing trader, VAT fraud, and even the cost of police time in investigating
con men trying to get into homes, have been added together with genuine ID
fraud by the government in a hamfisted attempt to artificially inflate its
figures. A full breakdown of the government's figures can be found here (PDF).
But as Silicon notes, actual ID fraud losses are a
third of Home Office estimates at around £494m. The Home Office concedes
establishing ID fraud losses are an inexact science, but maintains that
its £1.7bn figure is only a "conservative estimate". This
explanation has failed to convince the Liberal Democrats, which slams the
government's "fraudulent" ID fraud figures.
"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,", said
MP Alistair Carmichael, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman. "For
example, 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."
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