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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Does Your Age, Sex, and Location Make You a Target for Cybercrime this Cyber Monday?

Do you know how likely you are to become a victim of internet crime, fraud, and identity theft based on your age, sex, and location? With Cyber Monday just around the corner, you need to be aware.

The United States loves to shop online. According to a recent study, ecommerce is growing 23 percent year-over-year, and a whopping 80% percent of Americans with an internet connection have made an online purchase in the last month.

Since 2016’s Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in the history of U.S. e-commerce —with $3.39 billion spent online—2017 is bound to be one for the record books. Unfortunately for bargain hunters, malicious attacks against consumers increase almost 40% on Cyber Monday. To help you understand your risk of being affected by cybercrime while shopping for gifts and deals, we analyzed cybercrimes that were reported to the FBI and CSN in 2015 and 2016—concentrating on internet crime, fraud, and identity theft. Based on reported complaints per 100,000 people, we were able to reveal the most and least affected states in the country for total cybercrime victims, the most victimized sex and age, and how much money people lose on average in each attack. We hope that this will inspire you to take extra precautions to protect yourself if you fall into one of these categories. For more on the methodology, please scroll to the end of this piece.
State By State Ranking of Cybercrime—From Most to Least in the Country

States are ranked from most to least total victims of cybercrime—by equally weighing the total number of internet crime victims (per 100,000 people), fraud victims (per 100,000 people), identity theft victims (per 100,000 people), average dollar loss per victim of internet crime, and average dollar loss per victim of fraud.

All ranking information is based on 2016 data from the FBI’s IC3 and CSN reporting databases. It’s important to note that the average dollar loss per victim of identity theft was not available from CSN, so this was not included in the ranking system. Also, states which tied were assigned the same rank.

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