Imagine waking up with a message from a loan company you've never heard before about a missing payment. Or, heading to your banking app only to find your account empty. You might even discover someone is accessing your social media account, messaging your friends, and sharing your intimate pictures with people you know. The worst part – you have no idea how all this happened, or who's behind it.
This is the nightmare millions of people who lose their online identities experience every year. In the UK alone, ID theft crimes accounted for 64% of all fraud cases reported to the Cifas National Fraud Database (NFD) in 2023 – a rise of 13% from the previous year. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received over 1.4 million reports of identity theft in 2022 alone, recording over $10 billion in fraud losses the year after.
