According to the joint FBI/National White Collar Crime Center’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) just-released 2010 Internet Crime Report, non-delivery of payment or merchandise, scams impersonating the FBI, and identity theft were the top three most common complaints received in 2010. The report also includes a state-by-state breakdown of complaints.
Shortly after its 10th anniversary, the IC3 received its two millionth complaint since opening for business. Last year, the IC3 received more than 300,000 complaints, averaging just over 25,000 a month. About 170,000 complaints that met specific investigative criteria, such as certain financial thresholds, were referred to the appropriate local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies. But, the complaints not referred to law enforcement, including those where no financial losses had occurred, served as valuable pieces of information for intelligence reports and helped identify emerging trends.
Highlights from the report:
• Most victims filing complaints were from the U.S., male, between 40 and 59 years old, and residents of California, Florida, Texas, or New York. Most international complainants were from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, or India.
• In cases where perpetrator information was available, nearly 75 percent were men and more than half resided in California, Florida, New York, Texas, the District of Columbia, or Washington state. The highest numbers of perpetrators outside this country were from the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Canada.
• After non-delivery of payment/merchandise, scams impersonating the FBI, and identity theft, rounding out the top 10 crime types were: computer crimes, miscellaneous fraud, advance fee fraud, spam, auction fraud, credit card fraud, and overpayment fraud.
The report also contains information on some of the alerts sent out by the IC3 during 2010 in response to scams, including those involving:
• Telephone calls claiming victims are delinquent on payday loans.
• Online apartment and house rental and real estate scams used to swindle consumers out of thousands of dollars.
• Denial-of-service attacks on cell phones and landlines used as a ruse to access victims’ bank accounts.
• Fake e-mails seeking donations to disaster relief efforts after last year’s earthquake in Haiti.
If you think an Internet scammer was targeting you and you didn’t fall for it, the IC3 suggests you file a complaint anyway– the information is vital in helping them fight cybercrime.
The full report is available here (Direct PDF Download)
