Surfers Swindled Out of Millions

Business lost more money to Internet fraud last year than individuals, and men lost more money than women, according to the annual report of the Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

Auction fraud was the most common type of crime reported to the Washington-based IFCC, which is operated jointly by the FBI and the nonprofit National White Collar Crime Center, but the Nigerian e-mail scam hit its victims the hardest.

Successful Scams

According to the report, 42.8 percent of the 16,775 complaints the IFCC received last year concerned auction fraud, with the average loss for auction fraud victims pegged at $395.

However, the highest per incident loss was $5,575 for victims of the Nigerian e-mail fraud. According to the report, just .6 percent of the 9,864 people who reported a monetary loss, or 59 people, admitted losing money to that particular scam.

The Nigerian scam has gotten so much attention that the U.S. Secret Service is now investigating it, says Ronda Ellcessor, a spokesperson for the Richmond, Virginia-based NW3C.

The government of Nigeria recently set up a Web site to combat the scam. But the site has since been taken down, and attempts to reach government officials there have been unsuccessful.

Identity theft also cost victims a lot of money, with the 2,249 people who reported a monetary loss saying they were fleeced for a median of $3,000 per victim.

Millions Lost

In total, the report says that $17.8 million in losses were reported to the center in 2001, with a median dollar loss of $435.

The report also included the following details:

• More than half of all fraudsters live in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Illinois.
  
  
• One-third of all victims live in California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
  
  
• Eighty-one percent of fraudsters and more than 70 percent of their victims are men.
  
  

Despite the lack of a clear relationship between age and amount lost, most of those who lost $5,000 or more were over 60.

Ellcessor says the report is drawn up to give law enforcement agencies a picture of what is happening and help them coordinate crime-prevention efforts. She says the NW3C is funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice and has tracked all types of white-collar crime, from credit card fraud to child pornography, for 10 years.