The Internet Crime Complaint Center's report for 2006
Week 12 2007
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in USA started as a partnership between the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and is focused on cyber crime.
IC3's report for 2006 has just been published and is interesting reading. Not the least when comparing the actual submitted complaints to what is focused upon in the media.
Media focus is to a large extent about scary terms as phishing and identity theft; both of which only count for a minor fraction ot the reported complaints as is shown below.
Note in particular that the report is from the US and thereby does not, nor intends to, represent "Internet crime in the world". However, the results should be interesting and presumably to some extent relevant also for other countries and regions. One may on the other hand assume that the number of perpetrators from the US is somewhat overrepresented in this report compared to what would have been seen in similar reports from other parts of the world.
A few "highlights" from the report
Contrary to what may have been expected (?) the number of submitted complaints in 2006 shows a 10% decline from the previous year. The reason why can of course only be speculated upon, but it may have been due to the increased focus on the penalties involved in engaging in cyber crime.
The total amount of money lost shows an increase from the previous year and is an all time high of USD 198 million.
As mentioned above, the "popular" fraud techniques like e.g. identity theft and phishing were not among those most reported. By far the most reported offense complaints had to do with auction fraud - 45% (a decrease from 2005). Number two on the list is non-delivery of merchandise and/or payments (19%). Identity theft represented less than 2% of the complaints.
The report provides several demographical statistics regarding both the perpetrators and the victims. Not surprisingly (perhaps?) those perpetrators who were identified by gender, were mostly male (75%). Male victims were also reported to have greater losses than females.
It is also interesting to note that persons older than 60 years reported higher losses than any other of those age groups represented in the report. This may perhaps be explained by the fact that this age group was not exposed to the Internet and its use at an early age.
Anonymous contact methods between the perpetrators and the victims were by far the most used technique, with emails and web pages as the most popular tehniques; often multiple contact methods were used. Only in 1,5% of the cases were face-to-face meetings used. More surprisingly is the fact that almost 18% had contact by telephone and more than 10% corresponded by physical mail ("snail mail").
A caveat regarding interpretation
One should in particular take into consideration that this report and the statistics presentented above represent the complaints reported to IC3. For various reasons organizations and individuals may choose not to report when they are victimized of cyber crime. How this would affect the abovementioned statistics compared to what is the real sutuation, would in itself have been an interesting analysis.
More information
The full report - "The Internet Crime Complaint Center 2006 Internet Fraud Crime Report: January 1, 2006-December 31, 2006" is available as a PDF file from this link (opens a separate browser window).
The report also provides a useful set of best practices to prevent Internet crime (appendix II).
