The main research question is whether including existing credit card fraud as a type of identity theft will affect victims’ profiles (Copes et. al., 2010). The aim is to gather more understanding of what constitutes identity theft, thus suggesting solutions to decrease identity theft rates.
To introduce the solution to the primary research issue, the respondents of the survey, which was used as a base for the article, were asked a series of questions:
- Whether their existing credit cards, existing bank account, or the personal information used to get new credit cards/bank accounts were victimized by third parties without permission;
- Whether they ever gave out personal information or responded to any kinds of solicitation;
- Whether they ever reported being victimized;
- How serious they considered the cases of fraud to be.
The data was collected based on the responses gathered from people who were selected by random digit dialing. The respondents had to be over 18 years old, and the members of the surveyed household. Several dependent and independent variables were used in the survey. The dependent variables are existing credit card fraud, existing bank account fraud, new credit card fraud, and the variable summarizing responses from the first three ones. Accordingly, the independent variables include gender, race, age, education, income, and marital status.
The data the researchers used was collected previously by the National Public Survey on White Collar Crime. The survey was conducted by the workers of the National White Collar Crime Center in 2005.
The researches concluded that, more often, the victims of identity theft were white, middle-aged female college graduates with relatively high income. They did not usually report the fraud to the crime control agencies and did not tend to engage in risky matters, including giving out their personal data. These women were mostly the victims of the existing credit card frauds. The victims of the other two fraud types were usually young black women with lower income. It is a serious observation that can be neglected if the existing credit card fraud is considered identity theft. If that happens, the researches may fail to investigate identity theft in-depth; thus, it will be challenging to reduce identity theft.
References
Copes, H., Kerley, K. R., Huff, R., & Kane, J. (2010). Differentiating identity theft: An exploratory study of victims using a national victimization survey. Journal of Criminal Justice, 38(5). 1045–1052. Web.