In the modern era, the scale of global fraud is rapidly increasing as new levels of wealth and new technologies develop. The technologies often aid both the fraudsters and the fraud investigators, resulting in a technological arms race that can drastically shift the statistics associated with fraud.
Also of concern is the reporting rate—law enforcement in the United States currently operates a website (co-run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the White Collar Crime Center) which exists as a collection point for internet fraud reports, while no such facility exists in the United Kingdom. This means that the only real defense against fraud comes in the form of relatively unpublicized warnings and similar well-meaning attempts to educate the public about the growing threat of internet fraud, without the rigor associated with formal studies. As a result, fraud gets far less attention from law enforcement than more headline-grabbing internet crimes such as the use of the web to take advantage of children.
The other thing to keep in mind when measuring the extent of global internet fraud is the extremely high ratio of fraud attempts to successful scams. In today’s internet age, it is extremely inexpensive to commit fraud on a wide scale—all one needs is access to a large number of email addresses and a secure bank account. Even if only a small percentage fall for the scam, it can be extremely profitable if thousands of people have been emailed at no additional costs.
Other varieties of internet crime are also associated with internet fraud: for instance, criminals may use computer viruses to co-opt other computers to create enormous networks that automatically send fraudulent emails and scams. These “botnets” can bypass spam filters which are on the lookout for mass emails from a single computer. It is estimated that the largest botnet known, a botnet created by the computer virus “Confiker”, has over ten-million computers co-opted into its network, and a capacity for spam of 10 billion emails a day.
It is difficult to track the numbers of global fraud, but it is easy to draw a conclusion: it is serious, and growing.