How many times do most people have their credit cards fraudulated in a year?
Assuming that your question means “how often do people’s credit cards get used fraudulently?”, the answer is, very rarely. There was an interesting article on the subject in Business Week a couple of years back. A senior VP from Visa was quoted as saying that fraud losses have declined from 19 cents for every $100 of credit-card spending in 1991 to 7 cents per $100 of spending in the first quarter of 2006. He also said that only about 2% of consumer data that were exposed in a security breach ever gets used fraudulently. In a large-scale security breach, the incidence is even lower. A company called ID Analytics did a comprehensive study of four cases of large-scale data theft, which exposed data on 500,000 or so consumers. They found that only 0.09% of that data was used fraudulently.
Are you asking how often one experiences problems with identity theft? That SHOULD be very rare. But because people are not informed and/or are careless, information gets into the wrong hands. People can steal your credit card information all too easily- especially when you use it for online transactions. One should only use one credit card and should limit the amount that can be charged on it for use with online transactions. You can always call your credit card company before a big transaction to notify them about it if necessary. I have one credit card I have designated for online transactions only and that is generally the only one I use (I do make an occasional exception.) Still, once you have entered your credit card info online, that info is stored on your hard drive and from what I hear, it can be pretty easy to hack a hard drive and obtain that info. I wouldn’t know how to begin- but many techies can! Or are you asking how many times you can report fraud on your card? I guess
