Criminals are monetizing stolen identities at higher rates and stealing larger sums, while more victims report severe emotional distress, including self-harm.
Those are the findings of the 2025 Consumer Impact Report, prepared by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a nonprofit organization founded to provide identity theft victim assistance and consumer education, and sponsored by Experian, a global information services and fraud prevention company.
The report is based on a survey that sampled 4,122 individuals who sought assistance from the ITRC from August 2024 to July 2025 and identified themselves as victims of identity crime (ITRC victims), and a second, similar survey of 1,033 general consumers, which included 401 individuals who reported being a victim of identity crime but did not seek assistance from the ITRC (Consumer victims).
The report noted that more than 20% of ITRC victims lost more than US$100,000 in an identity crime, and more than 10% lost more than $1 million in a single incident. “Losses reported to the ITRC increased in every band, a trend that indicates the financial stakes for the most severe cases of identity crime are rising across the board.”
“When we look at these million-dollar losses, it speaks to the sophistication level of these bad actors, their ability to leverage tools like AI to more efficiently convince people to move their money,” ITRC President and CEO Eva Velasquez told TechNewsWorld.
“I also think that there’s just a level of uncertainty in the world right now that is creating more opportunities for confusion that criminals can exploit,” she added. “There are a lot of imposter scams. They’re proliferating everywhere.”
Plethora of ID Info Online To Exploit
The report also pointed out a significant shift in crime among Consumer victims. In 2025, only 19.6% of those victims reported losses of less than $500, compared to 31.4% in 2024.
“However, the year-over-year increase in high-value losses across both populations is a critical finding,” it maintained. “It strongly suggests that criminals are becoming more adept at monetizing stolen identities and are successfully extracting larger sums from victims across the board, regardless of the initial point of compromise.”
Roger Grimes, CISO advisor at KnowBe4, a security awareness training provider in Clearwater, Fla., agreed. “More people are putting more things of more value online and hackers are increasingly understanding how to separate the two,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“Hackers are getting ever better at hacking people and quickly stealing identities at scale and are almost never arrested or charged,” he said. “If I rob people online for a living and I never get caught, I’m going to get better and better at robbing people. It’s all profit and very little risk for the attacker.”
With more personal information from past breaches available online, criminals can build fuller, more holistic profiles that make scams more convincing and lucrative, explained Paige Schaffer, CEO of Iris Powered by Generali, a global cybersecurity and identity protection company.
“We’re also seeing a rise in organized, transnational crime rings that treat identity theft like a business, complete with scalable operations and sophisticated tools,” she told TechNewsWorld. “So, it’s not the crimes themselves that are new. It’s that they are being executed with unprecedented precision and speed. The result is more victims and greater financial loss per victim.”
Thoughts of Suicide
What is changing now is how easily attackers can operationalize personal information data, observed Henrique Teixeira, a senior vice president for strategy at Saviynt, an identity governance and access management company in El Segundo, Calif.
“In a recent attack I personally experienced, a criminal logged into one of my accounts using stolen credentials and then launched a subscription bombing campaign, flooding my inbox with hundreds of fake mailing list signups to bury legitimate fraud alerts,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Attackers are also taking advantage of fast digital onboarding, he added. “Financial institutions want to reduce friction for legitimate customers,” he explained. “Fraudsters exploit that same speed to open high-value accounts, make purchases, or intercept payments before anyone notices. AI now amplifies this by automating credential stuffing, impersonation, and synthetic identity creation.”
The report also noted that the repercussions of identity crime extend far beyond financial statements, inflicting deep and lasting wounds on the emotional and physical well-being of victims. The stress, fear, and violation associated with these crimes manifest as a spectrum of psychological trauma and physical symptoms, it added.
It found that among ITRC victims, 14% had thoughts of suicide, a 2% year-over-year increase, while among general consumers, 25% had thoughts of suicide, a 20% YOY jump.
“It was surprising to see how suicidal thoughts grew considerably with the general consumer population,” Velasquez said. “It’s a staggering number. We have been conducting this survey for 22 years, and we have always asked that question, and the response rate has hovered around two to five percent historically.”
Growing Emotional Toll
Victims may contemplate suicide because they can lose their entire life’s savings with little recourse in one of these scams, explained Maanas Godugunur, senior director for fraud and identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a global data analytics and services company. “This is a very troubling situation, with multiple factors affecting a victim of stolen identity — financial loss, shame, and feelings of helplessness,” he told TechNewsWorld.
KnowBe4’s Grimes added that the chances of getting money back from one of these scams are quite low in many scenarios. “It can easily cause depression if you don’t have a great support group around you, especially if that theft happens as you are closer to retirement and have a greater need for the money,” he said.
Kevin Lee, senior vice president for trust and safety at Sift, a fraud-prevention company for digital businesses, in San Francisco, called the suicide numbers “stark and concerning.”
“Part of what’s driving this is probably the sheer magnitude of the losses,” he told TechNewsWorld. “When people are losing $100,000 or even $1 million due to identity theft, they’re losing years of savings they’ve built up. The financial devastation is compounded by feelings of shame and embarrassment, which keep people from seeking help.”
There’s also the repeat victimization factor, he added. “When someone gets hit once and then targeted again, it creates this sense of helplessness,” he explained. “They feel like they can’t protect themselves, and that vulnerability is deeply traumatic.”
“The report shows that victims who reach out to the ITRC have lower rates of suicidal thoughts, which tells us that having support and resources makes a real difference,” he said. “But too many people are suffering alone, and that’s when the emotional impact becomes unbearable.”
