Las Vegas, NV (KXNT) - Nevada has made the top five on a list that no state wants to lead.
The financial website WalletHub is out with their rankings of states must vulnerable to identity theft and fraud, and the Silver State comes in 4th place.
In order to determine who is most likely to be exposed to and affected by identity theft and fraud, the financial website WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 14 key metrics ranging from identity-theft complaints per capita to the average loss amount due to fraud.
Hurting Nevada's overall ranking was a tie at the top (or bottom, if you prefer) in the categories of "Most Identity Theft Complaints per Capita" and "Most Fraud Complaints per Capita". Nevada trails only Hawaii in the category of "Highest Average Loss Amount Due To Fraud"
Florida gets the dubious distinction of topping the "Most Vulnerable" list, followed by South Carolina and Delaware. California finishes just below Nevada, in 6th place.
State that are rated the safest and most secure from ID theft? According to WalletHub, no state does it better than Wyoming, followed by Michigan, Kansas, Idaho and Kentucky.
Each new year brings new strategies taken by identity thieves and fraudsters. For example, this year, there has been a lot of identity theft and scamming related to federal stimulus payments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Plenty of other schemes, such as tech support scams and fake IRS calls, also abound.
In recent years, many Americans’ personal information has become compromised by big data breaches. While the number of breaches is down in 2020, several big companies have been impacted, including Marriott and Nintendo. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s most recent Data Breach Report, between January 1, 2005 and May 31, 2020, there have been 11,762 breaches. That accounts for over 1.6 billion records compromised.