That would be Delaware, and the kind of fraud that is being compared here is consumer fraud: identity theft, mortgage fraud, debt collection fraud and other types of scams focused on consumers. Only Florida and Colorado are worse, according to this piece from 24/7 Wall Street. New Jersey is ranked 10th, with Washington, Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, and Maryland ranked 9th through 6th. The stats for Delaware:
3. Delaware
> Complaints per 100,000 population: 636
> Total complaints: 5,708
> Identity theft complaints per 100,000: 83.5 (10th most)
> Recession home value decline: 20.3% (16th largest)
> Homes late on payment or in foreclosure: 6.7% (16th most)Twenty-one percent of Delaware’s identity theft complaints involve phone or utilities fraud. This is a higher percentage than any other state on our list. Delaware also has, by a large margin, the greatest rate of debt collection complaints in the country, with 69.8 complaints per 100,000 residents. Nevada had the second-highest level of debt collection complaints at 57.8 complaints per 100,000 residents.
Their method:
In order to identify the 10 states with the highest incidence of fraud, 24/7 Wall st. reviewed data from the FTC’s Sentinel Network Data Book, which compiles the total number of complaints for each state. These complaints are divided between identity theft and a second category, which includes all other kinds of fraud. 24/7 Wall St. combined the total complaints of fraud per 100,000 people in each of these categories.
People cited in the 24/7 wall Street article speculate that the worst of the fraud happened in the states hardest hit by the recession, which makes us something of an outlier here, I think. Perhaps the high debt collection complaints makes Delaware one of the states with lots of household debt. The high amount of phone or utilities fraud might indicate that it is just too easy to open or change accounts for these firms. Wonder if there is a correlation between these rates of fraud and any state effort to deregulate some of its businesses?