A partner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), now referred to as the Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3. The IFCCÂ’s role is to deal with Internet-related fraud by providing a user-friendly reporting mechanism to alert law enforcement agents of a likely criminal or civil breach. As a service to law enforcement and regulatory bodies, the IFCC maintains a centralized repository for Internet fraud complaints and maintains statistics related to fraud trends.

In 2002, the IFCC referred more than 43,000 complaints of online fraud to the law enforcement authorities, a three-fold increase over that of 2001, and the number of complaints continues to grow annually. For example, the total dollar loss from the 2002 referred fraud cases was $54 million, an increase in total dollar loss from $17 million in 2001. In 2005, IC3 referred 97,076 complaints of crime to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies around the U.S. for further investigation. The majority of cases concerned fraud and resulted in financial losses for victims. The total fraud dollar loss from all referred cases was $183.12 million with a median dollar loss of $424.00 per incident. This total amount was up from $68 million in 2004.

See Also: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ; Fraud.