New research conducted reveals that Kansas State has been ranked at number one for having the most number of identity theft cases in 2020. Most of the identity theft cases occurred due to government documents or benefits fraud.
The Department of Labor in Kansas had the highest number of fraudulent applications due to which the agency’s website was temporarily shut down to stop the criminals.
“Somehow they had got my information to know who my employer was. They knew my address. They knew obviously everything to fill out an application correctly,” victim Doug Dockhorn said. “So yeah, that was very disheartening.”
Dockhorn never filed for unemployment and was surprised to see it filed under his name. He works for a pharmaceutical company in Kansas.
“I had not filed for unemployment,” he said. “That kind of started a whole chain of poking around, trying to figure out what was going on because I was really kind of caught off guard by it.”
Up to 43,211 Kansas citizens became a victim of identity theft in 2020. This number is almost double the identity theft cases reported in 2019, which were 2,272. According to the Federal Trade Commission, this is an increase from more than 1,801.9%.
Experts believe that criminals are taking advantage of individuals as more and more people are using electronic devices to perform their daily operations.
“The fact that you’ve got more people at home shopping online, being a little bit more trusting as far as the things that they interact with on the web,” an expert about the FTC report, “So yeah, I’m not surprised at all.”
The experts also believe that there has been an increase in the number of phishing attacks as well. Monitoring of credit, unique password usage of online accounts, multi-factor authentication and biometric face verification are the tools that can be significant for security measures.
