Even though the classic victim of online fraudsters are men aged around 40, Cifas, an UK fraud prevention service, released a report which claims that actually a higher number of women is targeted by online scammers these days. Cifas also states that total number of reported swindles increased to 235,452 in 2009, a 10% more infractions than 2008.
2009 faced also a 32% more online identity theft in contrast with 2008. Most cases when bank accounts were broken were incriminating online fraudsters, so it seems that they do not use anymore just targeted victims, but they commit infractions on anyone they are able to.
Online frauds are constantly increasing day by day and methods used are getting more ingenuous, from traditional phishing emails to setting up fraud websites that can take advantage on every small piece of private information stolen, so online protection must be something to keep an eye on.
A well-positioned Romanian source informs me that fraudsters from Romania came to England just to perpetrate this kind of online fraud, being specialized on credit card data stealing and hoax emails for banking accounts’ data lift.
On the other hand, 2009 was also the year of online fraud detection’s level increase, due to more rigid lending criteria in UK banking field. It seems that this move allowed the authorities to observe on this situation more strictly and a higher number of loans applicants had to be turned down,so numbers of online infractions attempts stopped in time has increased.