FBI: Cyberscam complaints on the rise

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more complaints than ever last year with losses by scams and frauds totaling nearly $600 million.

The most-reported scam actually involved the FBI itself with scammers sending out mass e-mails purporting to be from the FBI and asking for money or personal information.

Those scams accounted for nearly 17 percent of the complaints received by the center. The other leading scams were:

• Non-delivered merchandise and or non-payment, in which either a seller didn’t ship a promised item or a buyer didn’t pay for an item (11.9 percent);
• Advance fee fraud, when a victim was asked to give money upfront, often for goods or services that never materialized (9.8 percent);
• Identity theft, when someone either stole or tried to steal a person’s identity or some kind of identity information (8.2 percent);
• Overpayment fraud, when a “buyer” sent a victim who was selling something a legitimate-looking check or money order (that turned out to be counterfeit) for an amount greater than the price of an item being sold, and then asked the seller to deposit the payment, deduct the actual sale price, and return the difference (7.3 percent).

The FBI listed other scams popular in 2009 and expected to be common in 2010:

• A new spin on the “hit-man” scam, in which individuals received an e-mail from an "assassin" who claimed he was going to kill them, but who said they would be spared if they sent money because someone in his organization knew a member of their family and pled for their lives.
• Spam or pop-ups offering free astrological readings, but only after birthdates and birthplaces were provided. Victims were then enticed into purchasing a full-fledged reading with the promise they would find out something favorable was about to happen. Of course, they never received the reading.
• Economic stimulus scams, where victims received a recorded phone message directing them to websites where they could apply for government stimulus money after first entering personal information and paying a small fee. Needless to say, no stimulus money was received.
• Fake pop-up ads for anti-virus software that warned of the existence of computer viruses but actually downloaded malicious code when clicked.

Additional information is available from the FBI statement on its 2009 cybercrime report.