US consumers lose record amounts of money to Internet scams

by Simon Kerbel Apr 4th 2008

It's like the song says, "Everybody plays the fool."

The FBI reports that US consumers lost a record 239 million dollars to Internet scammers and thieves in 2007. Given the record number of spam emails being sent (which accounted for 75% of the Internet scams), and the mass amounts of money being made by scammers worldwide, this really shouldn't surprise us; it's kind of like reporting that peanut butter goes well with jelly.

Internet scams are a hot, and a big, business.

A couple interesting tidbits:

Even though the amount lost this year was higher, the actual number of complaints was down. This means that scammers are focusing more and more on big ticked items, such as work-at-home schemes and so forth.

Most of the victims of online fraud were men-about 75 percent. Depending on which gender you asked, the reasons given were either that men are way more gullible than women, or men take more "gutsy risks." We'll let you decide which gender said which.

More than 75% of the online fraudsters were male, which provides a nice complement to the above number. Not only can we take it, we can also dish it out.

So what can you do to avoid getting burnt and becoming a statistic?

Well, education is a must. We need to educate ourselves about scams. Common sense is also a good thing to have around. If an offer is too good to be true, it usually is.

There is also a wide variety of software out there to combat internet scams: spam filters, phishing filters. Most new antivirus or internet security suites have some form of online fraud protection.

Tags: Internet, scam

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Tracy Esau said 1:48AM on 5-01-2008

people say that jeff paul is a scam. i completely disagree with this comment because i personally have a really good experience with jeff paul and it really helped me make money. People should avoid blaming someone for something that is not true.

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