Reported Internet Crime Soars; E-mail Top Fraud Channel: FBI
Consumers filed 275,284 complaints with the Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2008, marking a 33.1% increase over 2007, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation reported yesterday.
The FBI forwarded 72,940 of the complaints to federal, state and local law enforcement for further investigation, the agency said.
The total dollar loss from all the referred cases of fraud was $264.6 million with a median dollar loss of $931 per complaint, according to the FBI. This is up from $239.1 million in total reported losses in 2007, the FBI reported.
The median dollar loss in 2007 per complaint was $680, according to the FBI.
Not surprisingly, e-mail was by far the No. 1 way scammers found their victims, accounting for 74% of initial contacts, the report said. Web pages were No. 2 at 28.9%, according to the report.
Men were far more likely to be perpetrators
