FBI Cybercrime Figures: Losses Up, Crimes Down

The new FBI cybercrime figures offer plenty of statistics to scare us, even more to keep us on our toes, and a smidgen of hope among the bad news.The report, from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)showed that in 2007 the domestic dollar loss from Internet crimes hit an all-time high of close to $240 million. That's a $40 million jump over 2006.

The smidgen of hope? The more than 206,000 reported incidents of Internet crime (emphasis on reported) was down a bit, even though the total cash scammed was up.

Another bit of hope (I guess) is that the top two crimes involved fraudulent auctions and failure to receive merchandise purchased online. Bad stuff, sure, but different only in communication/transaction medium from phony newspaper or magazine ads or auctions-by-mail.

No doubt at all that the Internet makes these sorts of crimes more likely, and more convenient for the crooks to mount, but to my eyes they're not cyber-only crimes the way a password or PIN-grabbing bit of malware is.

Doesn't make it any less painful for the victims, of course.

I3 is a joint venture between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3c.)

The complete report along with past reports can be downloaded here.