A survey of Internet crime shows that in the last year there has been a crime wave of rip offs.

Internet crime increased by a third with nearly 77.4 percent of the criminals being men. The figures, released by the US National Internet Crime Centre said that the total dollar loss of the crimes were about $265 million. That's $26 million more than the price tag in 2007. On average punters lost $931.

Americans filed 275,284 reports claiming to be ripped off on the Internet, the highest number reported since the centre began keeping statistics in 2000. Most of the complaints come about merchandise that wasn't delivered or payment that wasn't received, Internet auction fraud and credit/debit card fraud. Other scams include confidence frauds such as Ponzi schemes, check fraud, the Nigerian letter fraud and identity fraud.

One of the most popular scams in 2008 involved sending e-mails crafted to appear as if they'd been sent by the FBI. These involved asking for the victim to send personal information, such as a bank account numbers, claiming the FBI wanted the information to look into an impending financial transaction. We suspect that only in the US could a scammer ask for information and be told it. The Nigeran scam is quite successful over there too.

The FBI has issued warnings about such scams in the past, but everyone assumed the warnings were from scammers and just ignored them. However statistically if you get an email from a man based in California, New York, Florida, Washington, Texas or the District of Columbia it is more likely to be a fraud.