Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere!
Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
It s Web News Monday and here s what s shaping our Web world this week.
InformationWeek is reporting that Internet Fraud reached a whopping $239 Million for 2007 in the U.S. The report is based on the Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) 2007 Internet Crime report.
The IC3 serves to field complaints about online crime on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center.
Here’s some fast facts:
* The IC3 received 206,884 complaints in 2007
* The IC3 referred 90,008 complaints to the appropriate law enforcement authorities for investigation, most of which alleged fraud and financial loss.
* The dollar loss for referred complaints totaled $239.09 million, with a median loss of $680 per complainant.
* According to the FBI’s cyberdivision, appears to believe that a significant number of people are not reporting Internet crimes.
* The report indicates that in complaints that could be linked to a perpetrator, more than 75% of cybercriminals were men and that half resided in California (15.8%), Florida (10.1%), New York (9.9%), Texas (7%), Illinois (3.6%), Pennsylvania (3.5%), or Georgia (3.1%).
* When perpetrators were measured per 100,000 people, the District of Columbia had the most, with 99.10 per 100,000, followed by Nevada (65.45), Delaware (41.98), and Florida (40.73).
* Counting by country, the United States had the most cybercriminals, with 63.2%, followed by the United Kingdom (15.3%) and Nigeria (5.7%).
Men reported larger losses than women, with their median losses coming to $765 and $552, respectively.
According to the report, the numbers do not reflect overall Internet crime activity in these countries.
E-mail was the most common means (73.6%) by which cybercriminals made contact with their victims, followed by Web pages (32.7%), phone contact (18%), and postal mail (10.1%). “The anonymous nature of an e-mail address or a Web site allows perpetrators to solicit a large number of victims with a keystroke,” the report explains.
Check out the links and the facts at today s WOW Technology Minute at: http://www.webprominute.org