FTC Identity Theft Reports Passed the 2024 Total by September 2025

Identity theft reports filed with the US Federal Trade Commission between January and September 2025 exceeded the total number filed across the whole of 2024. Credit card fraud reports reached 503,450 over the first three quarters, roughly 180,000 more than the same period a year earlier.

A report to a federal agency is an action taken by an affected person. It is not a vendor estimate, not modelled from a survey panel, and not published by anyone selling a remedy.

The corpus spends a great deal of effort discounting figures — leak-site counts at 25-1230, workforce modelling at 25-1209, vendor telemetry at 26-0513. This one is a count of filings and this desk grades it high accordingly.

The caution is different from the usual one. Reports rise when fraud rises, and also when awareness rises, when reporting is made easier, or when a bank tells a customer to file one in order to progress a dispute.

Most people who experience card fraud never file with the FTC — they call their bank, get the transaction reversed, and that is the end of it. The figure is a floor with an unknown and probably moving multiplier.

It is the category with the best consumer protection in the entire corpus. Liability is capped or zero, the reversal mechanism works, and the loss lands on the issuer rather than the individual.

That it is also the largest reported category is a reminder of something the corpus keeps circling: the harms that get counted are the ones somebody already had a process for. The exposures this database records as most serious — biometrics at 26-0324, children’s identity at 26-0113, medical history at 25-1010 — generate no report at all, because there is nowhere to file one.