Boise Police Report Identity Theft Has Increased by 200% The Boise Police Department released their annual report to the community earlier this week. The good news, is that overall crime is down overall 9% across the city. The bad news, is that identity theft increased by 200%! Boise Police say the pandemic definitely contributed to a drop in the overall crime rate. Which makes sense. People were locked up in their homes all year and weren't out and about committing crimes. However, the pandemic has also provided cybercriminals with the perfect opportunities to commit crimes online. In June of 2020, Boise policed actually warned about an increase in identity theft involving unemployment benefits. In just a week's span, the department reported it received 16 reports of scammers fraudulently filing unemployment claims by using the personal information of victims' to rob them of their benefits. This was a pretty common occurrence all across the country. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received about 1.4 million reports of identity theft nationally in 2020.