Americans lost at least $548 million to identity theft and consumer fraud last year as the Internet provided new victims for age-old scams, according to government statistics released Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it received 635,000 consumer complaints in 2004 as criminals sold nonexistent products through online auction sites like eBay Inc. or went shopping with stolen credit cards.<\/p>\n
Internet-related fraud accounted for more than half of the remaining complaints as scammers found victims through Web sites or unsolicited e-mail, the FTC said.<\/p>\n
Auction fraud was the most common Internet scam, the FTC said in its annual fraud report, followed by complaints about online shopping and Internet access service.<\/p>\n
The number of incidents was up across nearly every category from 2003, but it was unclear whether that represented an actual increase in fraud or simply a greater awareness of the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel fraud program.<\/p>\n
Consumers likely lost significantly more than the amount reported, as fewer than half were able to pin a dollar figure on their losses.<\/p>\n
A recent report by the Better Business Bureau found that most cases of identity theft occurred through the theft of a checkbook or other offline methods.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2005\/TECH\/02\/01\/id.theft.scams.reut\/index.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4272,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785\/revisions\/4272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}