recipients of breach notification letters are 4 times more likely to be victims of identity theft
According to a recent survey published by Javelin Strategy and Research, consumers who have received a breach notification letter are four times more likely to be a victim of identity theft than other consumers. About 11% of American consumers have received a data breach notification letter in the past 12 months. Of those consumers, the data most often lost is Social Security numbers. In second place, 15% percent of the consumers surveyed indicated they received a breach notification letter as the result of the loss of their ATM personal identification numbers .
Of importance, 19.5% of consumers that received a data breach notification letter in the past 12 months indicated that they were victims of identity fraud after the reported identity theft. In comparison, 4.3% of consumers surveyed reported they had not received a breach notification letter, but, in fact, had been a victim of identity theft.