Online Fraud Loss Doubles

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently released its annual report about fraudulent activity on the Internet.  Online crime complaints increased substantially once again last year, according to the report. The IC3 received a total of 336,655 complaints, a 22.3% increase from 2008. The total loss linked to online fraud was $559.7 million; this is up from $265 million in 2008.

National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) Director Donald Brackman said the report’s findings underscore the threat posed by cyber criminals. “The figures contained in this report indicate that criminals are continuing to take full advantage of the anonymity afforded them by the Internet. They are also developing increasingly sophisticated means of defrauding unsuspecting consumers. Internet crime is evolving in ways we couldn’t have imagined just five years ago.”

The full report is available here, and highlights include:

• Top scams include:
  • Email scams that used the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) name (schemes in which the scammer pretended to be affiliated with the FBI in an effort to gain information from the target) represented 16.6% of all complaints submitted to IC3.
  • Non-delivered merchandise and/or payment (in which either a seller did not ship the promised item or a buyer did not pay for an item) accounted for 11.9% of complaints.
  • Advance fee fraud (a scam wherein the target is asked to give money upfront- often times- for some reward that never materializes) made up 9.8% of complaints.
  • Identity theft and overpayment fraud (scams in which the target is given a fraudulent monetary instrument in excess of the agreed-upon amount for the transaction, and asked to send back the overpayment using a legitimate monetary instrument) round out the top five categories of all complaints submitted to IC3 during the year.
• In addition to FBI scams, popular scam trends for 2009 included hitman scams, astrological reading frauds, economic scams, job site scams, and fake pop-up ads for antivirus software.
• Of the complaints involving financial harm that were referred to law enforcement, the highest median dollar losses were found among investment fraud ($3,200), overpayment fraud ($2,500), and advance fee fraud ($1,500) complainants.

via IC3′s 2009 Internet Crime Report

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