Banking and financial services providers may continue to feel the biggest pinch in the wallet based on the continued proliferation of the worldwide electronic identity theft epidemic, but the people who are most commonly seeing their personas and credit histories hijacked are at the other end of the spectrum.

When Javelin Strategy & Research releases its Identity Fraud Survey Report each year, we’ve come to expect that the study, now in its seventh year, will find that the theft of individuals’ personal information has once again risen substantially.

This year’s survey, which is based on telephone interviews conducted with 5,000 U.S. adults in late 2009, specifically contends that the number of adult ID fraud victims in the U.S. increased 12 percent to 11.1 million, with the financial fallout of all such crimes jumping 12.5 percent (or $6 billion) to $54 billion.

However, the 2010 iteration of the survey also finds that it is most often financially vulnerable segments of society — young people and small business owners explicitly — who are currently being most successfully targeted by identity thieves.

Huge banks, payment card providers and online trading companies are undoubtedly writing off mountains of losses based on all the phony and stolen accounts that they have to cover for each year, Javelin’s researchers concede. But it’s these two relatively shallow-pocketed constituencies that are being assailed by ID fraudsters at a noticeably accelerated pace.

When you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. So-called “Millennials” (or people ages 18-24) are being victimized in large part by fraudsters because they share so much of their information about themselves on social networking sites, Javelin notes. They also take the longest time, on average, of any group surveyed to detect that their reputation has been hijacked (132 days), leading to their personas being abused for the longest periods of time (149 days).

Essentially you have a group of people willing to post all the intimate details of their life on the Internet but who remain oblivious to their credit status. And many of them have no lengthy credit history at all, making it even easier for someone to take over and manipulate their likeness. Clearly, it all adds up to a perfect recipe for identity thieves.

As for small business owners, they on average experience ID fraud at one and half times the rate of all other U.S. adults, according to Javelin. The primary catalyst for this problem is that these individuals so frequently must use their personal information to handle business-oriented accounts and transactions, presenting attackers with a massive subset of people (typically without any IT security department watching out for them) that they can target for commercial-grade fraud.

These are people who also can likely least afford to have their identities taken offline for days, weeks or even months after discovering that they’ve been had and moving to regain their reputations. Beyond personal inconveniences and risks, their companies are likely to suffer as a result of any financial interruptions, especially in a troubled economy.

So, large corporations may be the ones who are writing off the largest parcels of cash as identity theft continues to grow by leaps and bounds every year. But, it’s increasingly the small guy with much to lose and almost no one watching out for them who are seeing their entire credit futures kidnapped.

Trickledown economics is as real in today’s world of cybercrime and identity theft as it’s ever been within the larger context. What remains to be seen is how this evolution will serve to chip away at the financial health of our society itself.

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