Top 10 Internet Crimes of 2006
According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center and reported in U.S. News and World Report, auction fraud and non-delivery of items purchased are far and away the most common Internet crimes. Identity theft is way down near the bottom.
Although the number of complaints last year207,492fell by 10 percent, the overall losses hit a record $198 million. By far the most reported crime: Internet auction fraud, garnering 45 percent of all complaints. Also big was nondelivery of merchandise or payment, which notched second at 19 percent. The biggest money losers: those omnipresent Nigerian scam letters, which fleeced victims on average of $5,100 followed by check fraud at $3,744 and investment fraud at $2,694.
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The feds caution that these figures don’t represent a scientific sample of just how much Net crime is out there. They note, for example, that the high number of auction fraud complaints is due, in part, to eBay and other big E-commerce outfits offering customers direct links to the IC3 website. And it’s tough to measure what may be the Web’s biggest scourge, child porn, simply by complaints. Still, the survey is a useful snapshot, even if it tells us what we already know: that the Internet, like the rest of life, is full of bad guys. Caveat emptor.