CoverScore
Edition 03 · Data & Privacy

Your data is already out there. The question is how much, and who is selling it.

One email address, checked against the public breach corpus, returns named and dated incidents. We rank what to do about it with the free options first — and this edition is walled: never shared with a commercial partner, no exceptions.

17% adoption
mitigation
+351% six-figure losses
fraud
82% in one year
breach
Free report · breach scan

What email do you use most?

One address, checked against the public breach corpus. Named and dated incidents, ranked by what to do about each one — free options first, no personal data shared with any partner.

Interactive tool — coming in a follow-up build
The inversion nobody tells you about

Older people are scammed less often — and far more expensively.

Reports filed fall with age, while the median loss per report climbs steeply. Frequency-based advice is aimed at the wrong end of the problem — this is why CoverScore ships the dual-axis ladder instead of a single frequency number.

fraud · gradient ladder
$417 → $1,650

The median fraud loss climbs a ladder by decade: $417 in your 20s, $520 in your 50s, $691 in your 60s, $1,000 in your 70s, $1,650 at 80+ — while the share of reports involving any loss falls from 44% to 21%.

20-29
417
44
30-39
450
40-49
500
50-59
520
60-69
691
70-79
1,000
24
80+
1,650
21

dual-axis: bars = primary measure · right column = secondary measure by the same bands

fraud reports filed with age + dollar loss (reports, NOT population prevalence) · calendar 2024
What sits inside Data & Privacy

Exposures, scored separately

Breach exposure is automated from one email address. The rest need something from you, and each says so — a tier-B row always shows its qualifier.

identity theft · gradient ladder
9% per year / 22% lifetime

9% of Americans 16+ experience identity theft each year (23.9M people); 22% — 1 in 5 — have experienced it in their lifetime. The peak age band is 50–64, not seniors.

16-17
1.4
18-24
7
25-34
8.9
35-49
9.9
50-64
10.9
65+
8.6
65+ is the terminal band; nothing finer published.
US residents 16+, NCVS Identity Theft Supplement · prior 12 months (2021)
fraud · gradient ladder
$750 → $9,000

Romance-scam median losses climb every decade: $750 (18–29) to $4,000 (50s), $6,000 (60s), $9,000 (70+).

log scale — spans an order of magnitude
18-29
750
30-39
2,000
40-49
3,000
50-59
4,000
60-69
6,000
70+
9,000
romance-scam loss reports by age · 2021 reports
breach · icon array
12% per year

12% of Americans 16+ received at least one data-breach notification in a single year — the only true per-person government probability.

share12 per 100
US residents 16+ (~263M), household survey · prior 12 months (2021)
mitigation · comparison
DIY 70% > paid 4–68%

Manual DIY opt-outs removed 70% of people-search profiles within a week — beating every paid removal service; the worst paid service managed 4% in four months.

diy week
70
32 volunteers, 7 services, 13 people-search sites (only controlled evaluation) · 4-month window

same denominator, both figures

elder exploitation
72% by known people

72% of the $28.3 billion taken from older Americans each year is taken by people they know — and in bank elder-theft filings, adult children are the most frequent perpetrators.

AARP/NORC prevalence-adjusted annual estimate; FinCEN BSA filings for perpetrator mix · annual estimate (2023)
Tier B · qualifier — $28.3B is a modeled estimate correcting for underreporting (AARP/NORC method); the 72%-known split is from that model. FinCEN's $27B is suspicious-activity flags, not confirmed losses.
Step 3 · Action

The strongest thing you can do is free.

Ranked on published effect size where one exists — and where it does not, we say so rather than implying one.

mitigation · mitigation

Turn on MFA everywhere; hardware keys blocked 100% of targeted phishing in Google's study.

−99.2%

Enabling MFA reduced account-compromise risk by 99.22% — and by 98.56% even for accounts whose passwords had already leaked.

study population & design
Azure AD accounts flagged with suspicious activity (quasi-experimental) · study window (2023)
mitigation
17% adoption

Only 17% of Americans have a credit freeze or fraud alert — both free since 2018. No causal effectiveness study exists, but a freeze blocks new-credit pulls by construction.

940,000+ credit reports analyzed · point-in-time (2021)
What everyone gets wrong

The defensible version

myth buster
median $0 OOP / 1 hour

The typical identity-theft case: median $0 out of pocket (88% of victims lose nothing), median 1 hour to resolve. The catastrophic cases concentrate in the elder tail.

identity-theft victims, most recent incident · 2021
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