A trend embraced by white-collar criminals is driving up health-care costs and creating nightmares for its victims. Medical identity theft is health-care fraud and ID theft rolled into one, and it’s a crime that’s expected to continue growing because it’s easy to carry out and difficult to detect.
The first study on the subject, done by the World Privacy Forum (WPF) in 2006, estimates that medical identity theft accounts for 2.7 percent to 3.2 percent of total ID theft, which is reported to be the fastest-growing crime over the last seven years.
In November 2007, the Federal Trade Commission estimated the number of cases of medical identity theft at 3 percent of all ID theft cases. That’s at least 250,000 medical identity theft cases per year.
