The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, released its 2008 annual report on Internet crime this week. According to the statistics, Internet fraud complaints to the FBI increased over 33 percent in 2008 over 2007. A total of 275,284 complaints were filed during the year, compared with 206,844 in 2007. Online fraud is also tracked by region, with the District of Columbia ranking highest in the nation in terms of per capita ratio. In terms of raw numbers, the most incidents came from California.

Fraud cases referred to federal, state or local law enforcement accounted for a dollar loss of $246.6 million, or an average of $931 per complaint. The greatest dollar losses came from check fraud, with an average of $3,000 per incident; confidence fraud at $2,000 per incident, and Nigerian advance fee scams at $1,650 per incident. In a curious twist of fate, many of the fraud incidents reported to the IC3 were scams that involved emails claiming to actually be from the FBI, which claimed that the victim had to send bank data as part of an investigation. Victims are told by the scammers, who are pretending to be FBI, that they must comply or will be prosecuted or will suffer a financial penalty.

According to the report, the vehicle of choice for perpetrating fraud remains email, with 74 percent of all reported frauds using email as the primary method of contact. Twenty nine percent of the reported frauds used the Web as primary contact.