With Internet auction incidents leading the way, cyberfraud jumped sharply and meant a $54 million total dollar loss in 2002, the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center's Internet Fraud Complaint Center reported this week. The FBI sent over 48,000 complaints to prosecutors, three times the 2001 figure, according to MSNBC.
But even with triple the number of referrals to prosecutors, the FBI said that may not cover more than a small percentage of the actual cyberfraud that occurs. They added that the IFCC received complaints involving spam, child porn, and computer invasions, but fraud is likely to continue rising as more people do business in cyberspace - and more people report fraud to the IFCC.
"[We help] victims by putting fraud information into the hands of law enforcement ... so these complaints are responded to quickly," Jana Monroe, assistant FBI director in charge of the Cyber Division, to MSNBC.
The IFCC report says a third of all fraud complaints came from California, Florida, New York, and Texas. It also says online auction fraud accounted for almost half the complaints - but the total losses barely made $320. On the other hand, the biggest dollar losses came from identity theft (average: $2,000, MSNBC said) and check fraud (average: $1,000, MSNBC said).
