Cons, ID theft, on line searching woes topped Iowans’ soaring fraud reports in 2020

Impostor scams, id theft and online buying problems ended up among the the top rated varieties of issues Iowans built to the Federal Trade Commission final 12 months. 

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Iowans in 2020 filed 12,428 fraud reports with the fee for losses totaling a lot more than $17.1 million, according to freshly unveiled information from the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network.

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That was up from 11,162 stories and $9.4 million in losses in 2019. 

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Nationally, individuals claimed dropping more than $3.3 billion to fraud in 2020, up from $1.8 billion in 2019. Just about $1.2 billion of the losses described in 2020 had been because of to impostor frauds, though fraud similar to on the internet purchasing accounted for about $246 million.

The network receives reviews, which it keeps private, instantly from customers, as nicely as from federal, condition, and community legislation enforcement agencies, the Better Business enterprise Bureau, industry customers and nonprofit companies. While the FTC does not intervene in person complaints, the reports are used for regulation enforcement investigations

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Client fraud grievances ended up on an upswing in 2019, and have greater even more in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The FTC obtained 2.2 million fraud stories from customers in 2020, with impostor ripoffs the most frequent style of fraud described. Fraud related to on the net purchasing was the next-most-popular group, elevated by a surge of reviews in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The two point out and national companies issued alerts in 2020 about pandemic-related scams, but the FTC data did not include unique figures for that group.

In 2020, the FTC launched ReportFraud.ftc.gov, an up-to-date platform for filing reviews with the company.

Lee Rood’s Reader’s Watchdog column aids Iowans get solutions and accountability from general public officials, the justice system, corporations and nonprofits. Reach her at [email protected], at 515-284-8549, on Twitter at @leerood or on Fb at Facebook.com/readerswatchdog.

This report at first appeared on Des Moines Sign-up: Scams, ID theft, on the net searching woes topped Iowans’ soaring fraud stories in 2020