The amount of money lost from online fraud is staggering and scary at the same time. According to a recent report from ic3.gov, losses from online fraud more than doubled last year, from $265 million in 2008 to nearly $560 million in 2009, according to figures released Friday by the FBI.
The figures come from complaints referred to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center. Last year, the IC3 received some 336,655 complaints, a 22.3 percent increase from the year prior.
The largest sources of complaints (16.6 percent) were e-mail scams that fraudulently used the FBI’s name to gain information from the recipient. Other scams are the sales from rogue antivirus software also known as misleading applications where the seller tries to scam a user by purchasing the full software license in order to remove the fake threats reported by the software. Of the top five categories reported to law enforcement during 2009, non-delivered merchandise and/or payment fraud ranked nearly 20 percent; identity theft 14 percent; credit card and auction fraud, just over 10 percent each. The median dollar loss was $575, while the highest median losses were associated with investment fraud ($3,200), overpayment fraud ($2,500) and advanced-fee fraud ($1,500).
Source: ic3.gov
See the full report at http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2009_IC3Report.pdf
I find this troubling as heck and incidentally that Ray Kurzweil’s concept of exponential models applying to the information age is still very much on point however in a direction I would not like to see so much headway being made. I’m expecting by next year my boy Frank to bring down these numbers considerably single-handedly of course!
Zuckman,
It’s getting out of hand, but it seems that there’s no end in sight as year over year the numbers keep increasing.
Perhaps I can just add to this that the best way to guard against being ripped off by online sales or auctions of any kind, is to use a bona fide online escrow company. Although it does add some cost, that will take uncertainty out of the transaction.
For my money, the best bona fide online escrow (and there seems to be ten fraudulent escrow sites for every bona fide one) is probably Escrow.com. In fact, it’s the only one that eBay recommends.
Take care,
Ulf Wolf
This is really scary. Something needs to be done about this and ASAP.
It’s getting out of hand, but it seems that there’s no end in sight as year over year the numbers keep increasing.
No one committed to stop this fraud …..fraud is also helping them
Hey I have a sales page on my personal development, self improvement and creativity training site, and I was wondering what I could do create confidence in my buyers, and at the same time protect myself to fraudulent transactions
Thanks for any advice
Eric,
If you are selling products and or services with a shopping cart solution you should get your Verisign and BBB logos displayed to improve buyer confidence. Make sure you have a valid certificate for Verisign. Don’t just display a copyright logo.