FTC To Hold Public Conference on Identity Theft

The Federal Trade Commission will host an all-day conference, “Planning For the Future,” examining the state of identity theft now and how it may evolve in the future. The event will take place on May 24, 2017, in Washington, DC.

2017 will mark the ten-year anniversary of the executive order creating the federal Identity Theft Task Force, which was co-chaired by the FTC. Despite numerous advances in combating identity theft, it remains a top consumer complaint each year to the FTC, and Department of Justice statistics show that millions of consumers are victims of identity theft. The conference will bring together academics, business and industry representatives, government experts and consumer advocates to discuss the ways in which identity theft affects consumers and how that has changed in the last decade. The FTC event will look at the full life cycle of identity theft, addressing how identity thieves acquire consumers’ information and what information they seek most often, as well as the cost and ease with which consumers’ data can be acquired. In addition, the conference will examine how identity thieves use information, and how they may attempt to use it in the future. Further, the conference will examine how to quantify the impact of identity theft, from financial and economic harms to the broader impact on public safety. The conference will also assess what resources are available to identity theft victims and their effectiveness in helping victims recover.