40% of US Identity Theft Reports Involve a Credit Card

The 51 mapped values come from the FTC's state tables, which include only reports where the consumer's state is known. Pool the 50 states and DC and the result is 422,070 card reports out of 990,097, or 42.6%. The national 39.6% divides 449,032 by 1,135,291. Same Data Book, different denominators, so 17 regions clear 39.6% and only 12 clear 42.6%.

The reports outside the map explain the difference. Of the 1,135,291 identity theft reports, 145,194 fall outside the 51 mapped regions, including 1,649 from Puerto Rico, which the basemap lacks. Only 26,962 of them carry a card tag. That is 18.6% card, against 42.6% inside the map.

Card reports are the likeliest to carry a state. Counting Puerto Rico, 94.1% of card reports are located, against 87.4% of identity theft reports overall; employment or tax-related reports (68.4%) and government documents or benefits reports (76.0%) are the least likely. The Data Book does not say why a report lacks a state, so the cause is unconfirmed even though the arithmetic is not.

Florida's 57,997 card reports among 115,840 identity theft reports make 50.1%, the highest share. California follows at 48.9% (68,323 of 139,665), then the District of Columbia at 48.7% on just 3,225 reports, Georgia at 46.8% and Nevada at 45.6%.

Fifth place is a coin flip. New York's 45.55% sits 0.02 points behind Nevada's 45.57%, and the FTC prints both as 46%. Say "among the top six" rather than "fifth".

At the other end, Wyoming's 186 of 697 reports give 26.7%, with New Mexico at 28.1%, Maine at 29.8%, West Virginia at 30.2% and Montana at 30.4%. Oklahoma is just behind at 30.8%. The 51 regions average 37.6% with a median of 37.1%, putting Florida 12.5 points above the average region and Wyoming 10.9 below.

Raw card report counts track population almost perfectly, with a correlation of 0.95, so a count map would mostly show where people live. The share cuts that link to 0.49 with the logarithm of population. Large states still tend to sit higher, and the five lowest, Wyoming, New Mexico, Maine, West Virginia and Montana, are all under 3.5 million residents.

The stronger link is reporting intensity. A state's card share correlates 0.84 with its total identity theft reports per 100,000 residents (Spearman 0.80). Card reports per 100,000 run from 32 in Wyoming to 264 in Florida, 8.3 times apart, while all other identity theft types run from 88 to 264, only 3.0 times apart.

That fits either more card fraud or more card-fraud reporting, and the file cannot separate them. Neither the FTC nor the BJS publications reviewed offer state-level evidence on how willing residents are to report identity theft.

Florida and Georgia rank first and second among ranked states for identity theft reports per 100,000 residents, at 528 and 517, ahead of Nevada's 466. DC, which the FTC leaves unranked, is third at 480. Florida's card and non-card reports are level at 264 per 100,000 each. Georgia files more of everything else, 275 non-card against 242 card, so its 46.8% comes with a high count of all types, not card fraud alone.

Popular explanations exist, tourism and retirees for Florida, military and financial-sector presence for Georgia, but they come from aggregator and listicle pages that cite no data, and none was tested here. The FTC's Data Book ranks states without analysing causes. Any cause remains an open question.

What the history does show is a stable top and a noisier middle. Florida and California held the top two places in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Georgia's share went from 42.0% to 44.0% to 46.8% over the same years.

One report can carry several theft types, and each type counts it. In 2024, 14% of identity theft reports included more than one type, so the seven type rows in the national table sum to 1,339,461, or 118.0% of the 1,135,291 total. In the 51 mapped regions the row sums run from 112% in Rhode Island to 125% in Indiana.

The denominator for every share here is the state's total identity theft reports, not the sum of its rows. Using the row sum would inflate the base by 12% to 25% and pull card shares down. Never add a state's card share to its loan or benefits share as if they split the total.

Five regions logged fewer than 1,000 identity theft reports in 2024: Vermont 651, Wyoming 697, Alaska 780, South Dakota 845 and North Dakota 924. On Wyoming's base, 25 reports are worth about 3.6 points of share, so one cluster of filings can reshuffle the ranking.

Single-year ranks do move. Wyoming's share was 36.5% in 2023 and 26.7% in 2024. Connecticut was 24.7% in 2023, the lowest in the country, and 44.5% in 2024. Between the two years a state's share moved 3.3 points on average, and the mean state share fell 1.1 points. No cause for any of these swings was found.

The Data Book itself warns that 2024 totals will likely change; it already restates 2023 card reports as 416,579 against the 416,582 first printed.

Nationally the card share was 39.9% in 2022, 40.2% in 2023 and 39.6% in 2024, steady within 0.6 points. In 2020 and 2021 it was 28.3% and 27.2%, but that was not a dip in card fraud. Card reports stayed near 390,000 while total identity theft reports swelled to 1,387,615 and 1,434,676.

The swelling came from government documents or benefits reports: 406,375 in 2020 and 395,948 in 2021, then 57,877 in 2022. One benefits subtype jumped 2,920% in 2020 to 394,324 reports, matching the pandemic unemployment-benefit fraud wave, and fell 88% in 2022. The denominator collapsed, so the card share rose.

State figures show the same break: Kansas's card share was 3.2% in 2020, on 43,211 reports, and 40.2% in 2023. This post therefore maps 2024 alone and trends only 2022 to 2024.

Sentinel splits credit card identity theft into exactly two types. New-account fraud means a card was opened in someone's name: 406,110 reports in 2024. Existing-account fraud means a card the victim already held was misused: 52,428 reports. New accounts are 88.6% of the two, so the data is overwhelmingly about cards that should never have existed rather than cards being run up.

The two do not add to the published credit card total. They sum to 458,538 against the FTC's 449,032, a gap of 9,506 reports, or 2.1%. A single report can carry both tags, so adding the subtypes counts those reports twice. The Data Book does not state this at subtype level; it is what the arithmetic requires.

What is absent is the taxonomy most people mean by types of credit card fraud. Sentinel records no method, so there is nothing here on skimming, card-not-present fraud, counterfeit cards, or cards lost and stolen. Those splits exist in payments-industry reporting, not in consumer complaint data, and no figure in this post can be read as describing them.

The split also understates what cardholders actually experience. Existing-account misuse is 11.4% of card reports here, yet the Bureau of Justice Statistics found 30.5% of identity theft victims said their most recent incident was the misuse of a single existing card. That kind of fraud is usually settled with one call to the bank and never reaches the FTC, so the data over-represents the cases serious enough to be worth reporting.

Card reports split into new-account fraud, where a card is opened in a victim's name, and existing-account fraud, where a card the victim already holds is misused. In 2024 new-account reports rose 7% to 406,110, while existing-account reports rose 17% to 52,428, so existing grew about 2.6 times as fast.

Over a longer view the gap widens. Since 2020 existing-account reports are up 55% and new-account reports up 11%; since 2022 existing is up 32% while new is down 1%. Existing accounts are still only 11.4% of subtype tags, with new accounts at 88.6%.

That mix probably reflects who files with the FTC. In the 2021 BJS survey the most common single incident was misuse of an existing credit card, 30.5% of victims' most recent incidents, and 67% of victims contacted a card company or bank, not the FTC.

Two cautions. These are report counts, so more reporting could explain the rise as well as more fraud. And the state files carry no subtype split, so this cannot be mapped. The subtype rows also overlap, summing to 458,538 against 449,032 distinct card reports, so never add them.

It settles where card-related reports are most and least common among FTC filings in 2024: Florida, California and DC at the top, Wyoming, New Mexico and Maine at the bottom. It also settles that 39.6% is the national figure and 42.6% the state-located one, and that neither is a reason to doubt the other.

It does not settle where card fraud is most common. Reports are a small, self-selected slice of victims, the share follows reporting intensity at 0.84, and nobody has shown why Florida and Georgia lead. It says nothing about dollars, either: the Data Book carries no loss figures for identity theft.

Check the FTC's data page before quoting. The newest Data Book listed there as of 6 October 2026 is calendar 2024, and its counts may be revised.