Posted 04/01/09 at 05:42:13 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to a report released Monday by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), complaints of Internet-related crimes went up by a staggering 33 percent last year.

According to IC3, they received 275,284 complaints last year (compared to the 206,884 in 2007). They were able to move 72,940 of these on to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Many of the referred complaints, which were caused by anything from online auction fraud to identity theft, cost consumers roughly $264.6 million, with the median dollar loss reaching about $931 per complaint.

So how you can you stay safe? Just be smart about how you compute on a daily basis. The report was careful to explain that 74 percent of the reported crimes were perpetrated through e-mail, with another 29 percent conducted through Web pages. Watch yourself out there!

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