From the It's About Time Department comes news ...
It’s only one data point from one year, but if this metric reported by a federal crime-fighting agency portends a trend, we may be seeing the stereotypically gullible Internet user growing wiser before our eyes.
From an IDG News Service story on our site:
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) runs a Web site where victims can report details of any cyberfraud. It shares the data with law enforcement agencies to help them hunt down criminals. Last year it received 303,809 complaints, almost 10 percent fewer than the previous year’s total of 336,655.
There have been previous dips – 2006 and 2007 saw declines – but the number of victimization reports filed to this Web site had risen dramatically in 2008 and 2009, which represented the high water mark. In fact, the number jumped 33 percent and 22 percent, respectively, in those latter two years.
And while variables such as public knowledge of the site’s existence could certainly play a role, there’s no way to look at the 2010 decline as anything other than welcome news.
As for the specifics of that decline, the story notes:
Complaints about 2009’s most-reported scam — malware-laden emails that purported to come from the FBI itself — dropped in 2010. In 2009 these fake FBI emails were a big problem, totaling nearly 17 percent of all complaints. In 2010, they totaled 13.2 percent.
Public education presumably played some role there.
There was also a drop in complaints about “advance fee scams,” where the victim is promised a big lottery payout or inheritance as soon as they pay a phony administrative fees. These dropped from 9.8 percent in 2009 to 7.6 percent last year.
The granddaddy of all Internet scams, one would like to think that there isn’t an Internet user alive who hasn’t heard from a foreign national in need of stateside assistance with the untangling of red tape that stands between them and an enormous inheritance. It’s been a decade or so since a State Department employee assured me that tales of people falling for this scam were not only true but surprisingly numerous, so it would make sense that even the casual Internet user might finally be catching on.
You can read the full report here.
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