What Happened to Identity Fraud Rates in 2H 2024?

What is the fraud rate? It’s a simple question, but unfortunately not a simple answer. 

Confirmed identity fraud is a lagging indicator — the “bust-out” that leads to charge-offs can come months or years after the initial application — and it’s also an imperfect one. Some fraudulently-opened accounts will never bust out and charge off, and in other cases the fraudulent cause of charge-offs may never be established.

However, in SentiLink's position of helping 400+ partners across a variety of industries assess identity and fraud risk at account opening, we have a unique window into fraud trends in real time. So we put together our first-ever SentiLink Fraud Report. 

This report covers the fraud rates we observed over the course of 2H 2024, based on our analysis of more than 100M applications, as well as many of the fraud trends spotted by our Fraud Intelligence Team over that time. It goes into a lot of depth, but here's a quick preview of one of the topline metrics: the overall identity theft rate.

(Note that when we refer to "fraud rates" here and in the report, we're talking about identity fraud at the point of account opening.)

Identity theft rose over 2H 2024

The rate of identity theft climbed significantly over the course of the second half of 2024. This shift was driven primarily by two things: a small but steady upward trend of identity theft in credit card applications, and significant identity theft spikes in DDA at a number of large banks late in the year.

And where is identity theft happening? Everywhere. The image below is a heatmap illustrating the raw number of identity theft applications we have in our data for 2H 2024 by the address listed on the application (which is often a reasonable proxy for the victim's location). 

Unsurprisingly, it looks quite similar to a population density heatmap of the United States.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

What else is in the report?

The SentiLink Fraud Report contains:

• Overall identity theft and synthetic fraud rates, charted weekly.
• Geographic breakdowns of each rate, by raw application count and proportionally.
• Per-use-case breakdowns of each rate for DDA, credit card, auto, and other consumer lending account applications.
• Qualitative review and case studies related to a number of fraud trends observed by our Fraud Intelligence Team in 2H 2024.
• Fraud attacks and trends we've observed at partners outside the world of traditional FIs, including retail energy, telecom, property management, and the public sector. 

Get your free copy of the report now

Click here to get your free copy of the SentiLink Fraud Report.