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.The total dollar loss from all the referred fraud cases was $198.44 million, with a median dollar loss of $724 per complaint. The total loss is up from the $183.12 million lost the year before.

Internet auction fraud was the most reported crime by far, making up 44.9% of all fraud complaints, the report noted. Nondelivered merchandise and nonpayment was the biggest complaint in that category.

However, the fraud complaint that accounted for the highest dollar loss was the Nigerian letter scam, which on average bilked each complainant of $5,100. Check fraud came in second, pulling in an average of $3,744 per victim.

The elderly generally lost more money than any other age group. People 60 and older reported losing an average of $866 per victim.