Sources such as the Non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center sub-divide identity theft into five categories:
• Criminal identity… See more

Identity thieves typically obtain and exploit personally identifiable information about individuals, or various credentials they use to authenticate themselves, to impersonate them. … See more

Identity theft is a serious problem in the United States. In a 2018 study, it was reported that 60 million Americans' identities had been wrongfully acquired. In response, under… See more

There is an active market for buying and selling stolen personal information, which occurs mostly in darknet markets but also in other black markets. People increase the value of… See more

The acquisition of personal identifiers is made possible through serious breaches of privacy. For consumers, this is usually a result of them naively… See more

In their May 1998 testimony before the United States Senate, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) discussed the sale of Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers by credit-raters and data miners. The FTC agreed to the industry's self … See more

International
In March 2014, after it was learned two passengers with stolen passports were on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing on 8 March 2014. It came to light that Interpol maintains a database of 40 million lost and … See more