Identity Theft: Making the Known Unknowns Known / SSRN, 1 March 2007
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=969441
CHRIS JAY HOOFNAGLE
"Surprisingly, there is little good public information available about the scope of the crime and the actual damages it inflicts. The publicly available data on identity theft come mainly from survey research.
The author hypothesises that if lending institutions reported limited information about identity theft, it would reveal that identity theft is both more prevalent and economically damaging than currently acknowledged, in part because of the rise of synthetic identity theft, a form that cannot be measured by victim surveys because they are unaware of the crime. Furthermore, the disclosure requirement would birth an anti-identity theft market, and the prevalence and severity of the crime would decrease dramatically as institutions compete to offer the safest financial products to consumers."