Americans Lost Hundreds of Millions to Online Scams in 2014

In 2014, victims of Internet crimes in the United States lost more than $800 million as a new report published by the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reveals. In total, the IC3 received 269,422 complaints last year consisting of a wide array of scams affecting victims across all demographic groups.

The most frequently reported crimes are broken down in the chart below, which also illustrates how different scams are targeted at different demographic groups. While confidence / romance scams, in which the criminal establishes an online relationship with his or her victim and later asks for money, are mostly targeted at middle-aged women, men are more likely to fall for too-good-to-be-true car listings and become victims of auto fraud.

For more information on the different kinds of online scams visit the IC3's website or check out its latest annual report on Internet crime [PDF].