Top 10 Internet Crimes of '06

An anonymous reader notes that "The Bad Guys blog at USNews.com offers a look at the top ten Internet crimes of 2006. The federal study cited draws on over 200,000 complaints to US law enforcement and regulatory agencies. Top crime: auction fraud, followed by other online rip-offs. "

Comments

Skewed results

[orclevegam]

The article mentions that the results are probably skewed by the likes of E-Bay providing direct links to file complaints, and it also doesn't say if the complaints were ever followed up on or not. This is probably a list of all complaints, rather than those that were shown to be legitimate.

There is no such thing as "Internet Crime"

[vivaoporto]

There is no such thing as "Internet Crime", and the data presented by this article, according to themselves, is not significant. From TFA:

The feds caution that these figures don't represent a scientific sample of just how much Net crime is out there. They note, for example, that the high number of auction fraud complaints is due, in part, to eBay and other big E-commerce outfits offering customers direct links to the IC3 website. And it's tough to measure what may be the Web's biggest scourge, child porn, simply by complaints.

Just take a look at the Top 10 list:

2006 Top 10 IC3 Complaint Categories (Percent of Total Complaints Received)

• Auction Fraud (44.9%)
• Non-delivery (19.0%)
• Check Fraud (4.9%)
• Credit/Debit Card Fraud (4.8%)
• Computer Fraud (2.8%)
• Confidence Fraud (2.2%)
• Financial Institutions Fraud (1.6%)
• Identity Theft (1.6%)
• Investment Fraud (1.3%)
• Child Pornography (1.0%)

Internet is only the communication channel used by the crooks, all the crimes depicted there are good old fashioned real life crimes. Being perpetrated via Internet is only a detail that should be irrelevant when categorizing crimes. What I would really like to see is the ratio of these same crimes perpetrated in real life vs. via internet. That would really be insightful and newsworthy.

Re:I notice

[faloi]

Probably neither. It's probably more about jurisdiction to pursue certain types of cases. Then again, anything with children gets top billing in the press, so it's possible the FBI releases dozens of "we caught someone who committed fraud" press releases that get ignored.

Spam?

[soft_guy]

Why isn't spam on the list? It is a crime in many places to send certain kinds of spam such as forged headers. I would think this would the most common type of cyber crime.