Cybercrime earns $180 billion overtaking drug trafficking

Date: June 03, 2006
Source: Sun-Sentinel.Com
By: Pete Martinez

With identity theft much in the news these days, many of us have found ourselves wondering just how safe our personal information is. And we're right to worry.

South Florida is now in the top six major metropolitan areas affected by such scams, with nearly 7,000 victims in Miami and Fort Lauderdale in 2005, according to a new report from the Federal Trade Commission. Internet auction scams account for about 18 percent of all reported fraud complaints in Florida.

Additionally, more than 50 percent of fraud victims in the United States say that the initial point of contact for a scam was through an e-mail or the Internet. While criminal activity via the Internet is still a fairly new phenomenon, the FBI ranks it just behind stopping terrorism and counterintelligence on their list of priorities.

And at the end of last year, the U.S. Department of Treasury announced that cybercrime overtook drug trafficking in terms of revenues generated -- $180 billion.
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