The Role of Victim Services for Individuals Who Have Experienced Serious Identity-Based Crime

ABSTRACT

Although much has been written about identity-based crimes, much less is known about victim services for identity-based crimes. This paper uses in-depth interview data collected from individuals who have both experienced a serious identity-based crime in the past 2 years and used services from the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, an organization focused on helping victims deal with identity-based victimizations. In so doing, the study adds to the literature in several ways. First, the study echoes the existing knowledge about victim experiences, in that there are financial, emotional, physical, and psychological impacts for victims of serious identity-based crime that mirror the experiences of victims of other types of serious crimes. Second, it adds new knowledge and understanding about the actions taken by victims of different types of identity-based crime, including how they initially seek out services, are influenced by organizations and agencies other than law enforcement, and obtain knowledge about their perpetrators. Finally, the study includes recommendations made by interviewees about how identity-based crime victim services could be enhanced to better serve victims of serious identity-based crime.

KEYWORDS:

• White-collar crime
• fraud
• victimization

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation to the staff of the ITRC, specifically Mona Terry and Charity Lacey, for assisting us with the recruitment of interviewees. This study would also not have been possible without the willingness of interviewees to share their stories with us. Finally, the editorial and managerial staff at Development Services Group, Inc. provided support and review of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1.  Experian is a consumer credit reporting agency.

2.  IdentityTheft.gov is the federal government’s one-stop resource for identity theft victims. The site provides streamlined checklists and sample letters to guide you through the recovery process.

3.  Serious identity-based crime is defined as any incident of identity theft and fraud other than those that involve only the misuse of an existing credit card.

4.  Advisors are trained on how to deal with a variety of identity-crime topics, including identity theft, financial, criminal, medical, and governmental identity fraud and other topics such as data breaches, scams, privacy, and cyber security.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by [grant number 2016–VF–GX–K006], awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.