2009 Internet Crime Report

From January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Web site received 336,655 complaint submissions. This was a 22.3% increase as compared to 2008 when 275,284 complaints were received. Of the 336,655 complaints submitted to IC3, 146,663 were referred to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies around the country for further consideration. The vast majority of referred cases contained elements of fraud and involved a financial loss by the complainant. The total dollar loss from all referred cases was $559.7 million with a median dollar loss of $575. This is up from $264.6 million in total reported losses in 2008. Unreferred submissions generally involved complaints in which there was no documented harm or loss (e.g., a complainant received a fraudulent solicitation email but did not act upon it) or complaints where neither the complainant nor perpetrator resided within the United States (i.e., there was not an appropriate domestic law enforcement agency for direct referral).Complaints received by IC3 cover many different fraud and non-fraud categories, including auction fraud, non-delivery of merchandise, credit card fraud, computer intrusions, spam/unsolicited email, and child pornography. All of these complaints are accessible to local, state, and federal law enforcement to support active investigations, trend analysis, and public outreach and awareness efforts.On January 1, 2009, IC3 implemented a new complaint classification system based on a redesigned questionnaire that generates an automatic classification of the complaint into one of 79 offense-based categories. This redesign also resulted in a number of changes to the way the system gathers and classifies complaint data. Further information about these changes can be found in Appendix I of this report. Significant findings related to an analysis of the complaint data include:

• Email scams that used the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) name (schemes in which the scammer pretended • to be affiliated with the FBI in an effort to gain information from the target) represented 16.6% of all complaints submitted to IC3. Non-delivered merchandise and/or payment (in which either a seller did not ship the promised item or a buyer did not pay for an item) accounted for 11.9% of complaints. Advance fee fraud (a scam wherein the target is asked to give money upfront- often times- for some reward that never materializes) made up 9.8% of complaints. Identity theft and overpayment fraud (scams in which the target is given a fraudulent monetary instrument in excess of the agreed-upon amount for the transaction, and asked to send back the overpayment using a legitimate monetary instrument) round out the top five categories of all complaints submitted to IC3 during the year.
• Of the top five categories of offenses reported to law enforcement during 2009, non-delivered merchandise and/or payment ranked 19.9%; identity thieft, 14.1%; credit card fraud, 10.4%; auction fraud, 10.3%; and computer fraud (destruction/damage/vandalism of property), 7.9%.
• Of the complaints involving financial harm that were referred to law enforcement, the highest median dollar losses were found among investment fraud ($3,200), overpayment fraud ($2,500), and advance fee fraud ($1,500) complainants.
• In those complaints in which perpetrator information is provided, 76.6% were male and half resided in one of the following states: California, Florida, New York, the District of Columbia, Texas, and Washington. The majority of reported perpetrators (65.4%) were from the United States. A number of perpetrators were also in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Malaysia, and Ghana.
• Among complainants, 54% were male, nearly two-thirds were between the ages of 30 and 50, and a little over one-third resided in one of the following states: California, Florida, Texas, or New York. The majority of complainants were from the United States (92%). However, IC3 received a number of complaints originating in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Puerto Rico.
• Male complainants lost more money than female complainants (ratio of $1.51 lost per male to every $1.00 lost per female). Individuals 40-49 years of age reported, on average, higher amounts of loss than other age groups.
• In addition to FBI scams, popular scam trends for 2009 included hitman scams, astrological reading frauds, economic scams, job site scams, and fake pop-up ads for antivirus software.