What and When Do People Notice?

Remember Brian from the beginning of this chapter? It took him about nine months to discover that he was the victim of identity theft, and he found out by being arrested. This is certainly one of the more harsh ways to discover it. The FTC has started keeping statistics on how long it takes a victim to notice, and they found that the average time is 12 months, as seen in Figure 5-11.

Figure 5-11. The average time it takes a person to notice that they are a victim of identity theft is 12 months.

The most common ways that people have discovered they were victims of identity theft are the following: ...

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