Men Are The Biggest Victims -- And Perpetrators -- Of Internet Fraud

The most common victim of Internet fraud is a man between 30 and 40 living in New York, California, or Texas, and he loses more money than his female counterpart.

That's the bad news from an annual report by the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, which shows that more men are the victims of Internet fraud and they also are generally taken for more money than women are. But it kind of evens out since men generally are the perpetrators, as well.

The average person filing a complaint with the IC3 was a man between the ages of 30 and 40, and he generally lived in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. According to the report, men lost more money in fraud scams than did women. The men lost $1.69 to every dollar that the women lost. The report also showed that the median loss for men was $920, compared with $544.73 for women.

Three-quarters of the people caught perpetrating fraud, whether through e-mail, telephone, or chat room scams, are men, according to the IC3 report. Nearly 61% of them live in the United States and half of the U.S. scammers lived in California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, or Tennessee. Of those living outside the U.S., a "significant" portion lived in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Romania, and Italy.

The 2006 Internet Crime Report is the sixth annual study based on complaints received by the IC3 and referred to law enforcement or regulatory agencies. Between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31 of 2006, the organization's Web site received 207,492 complaints. That's a 10.4% decrease from the number of complaints (231,493) filed in 2005.