New BBB Scam Stopper Will Help Consumers Protect Themselves From Fraud

Better Business Bureau and Western Union today launched BBB Scam Stopper, an education campaign to help consumers in the United States and Canada avoid common scams that con artists use to commit consumer fraud.

Consumer fraud is a serious problem in North America. According to the Federal Trade Commission and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, consumers reported losing more than $1.5 billion to all types of scams in 2011.

Western Union has long devoted extensive resources to stopping fraud, including training its agents to intervene if they suspect a customer is the victim of a scam. BBB investigates thousands of scams every year, and tracks scams through reports from consumers and businesses, a number of which use wire transfer.

On the Scam Stopper website, consumers can find facts and tips to stay informed and help reduce their chances of becoming a victim of a scam. The site also explains the science of scams, and how scammers use many of the same “sales tactics” that are used by legitimate businesses. Visitors can also sign up to receive BBB Scam Alerts, weekly emails with the latest scams reported to BBBs across the country.

The site highlights common scams like Emergency Scams (a friend or family member has an emergency, often in another country, and needs money), Overpayment Scams (a buyer overpays and asks for the difference wired back to them), Sweepstakes and Lottery Scams (you’ve won a lot of money, but you have to pre-pay taxes before claiming your prize), and more.

 Personal finance writer/blogger Erica Sandberg has also joined the effort and is blogging and creating public service announcements about scams and fraud for BBB Scam Stopper.
For more information, visit www.bbb.org/scamstopper.

Risks low for Internet scammers

If you consider answering any of the constant tsunami of e-mails offering millions hidden in Africa or elsewhere, I have some fabulous Florida swampland available.

Addressed to “Beloved One,” “Dearest One,” or ever-popular “Undisclosed Recipient,” scammers promise riches in exchange for advance fees.
Once mailed, then faxed, “Nigerian Letter,” or “Nigerian advance fee” e-mail scams now swamp the Internet.

“They very much involve organized crime,” said Det.-Const. Michael Kelly, of the Toronto Police department’s financial crimes unit.

“Dollar amounts are too high and the risks are too low,” compared to robbing banks, he said, adding gangs often use overseas agents to cash victims’ funds and avoid police.
“At least $1 billion a year is lost to mass marketing fraud,” despite educational programs by police, RCMP and federal Competition Bureau staff at six Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre sites, OPP Det.-Const. John Schultz said.

But the CAFC staffer said even that is a a low estimate. By comparing seized “sucker lists” with complaints to police, Schultz said analysts determined “only about 5% of the victims report to us.
“There are a number of reasons,” he said, including embarrassment and people believing police won’t help — especially over small amounts. “But a couple of hundred bucks multiplied by thousands of victims adds up.”

Promised $35 million in 1998, an indebted Toronto bookkeeper sent $2 million in company funds to Nigeria. He was charged. His firm failed. After re-emerging in the 1980s, a century’s-old style of letter scam offering fortunes in exchange for advance fees went viral. Now, via the Internet, senders are based mostly in the U.S., UK, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, South Africa, Netherlands and Spain.

Most scam e-mailers offering exclusive partnerships include supposed princes, sheiks, ex-military officers, bureaucrats, preachers, lawyers, bankers, oil executives, surviving relatives — and even a purported dying widow who received a message from God to share her fortune. Identical scams flood cyberspace via address-harvesting and bulk e-mail-sending software.
Spelling flubs are common, including:
• “Milloners Club Casino” on a lottery scam script Toronto Police seized recently.
• Several people lost more then $100,000 in a recent Toronto caper that included a bogus $2.6-million cheque with both “Publisher Clearing House” and the correct name, “Publishers Clearing House” printed on the front.

Most people realize foreigners may not be fluent in a second language, but crooks avoid raising suspicions with proper wording, some selling scripts to future scammers without anyone understanding the text. Photos are rarely legitimate.

Documents three recently-convicted Toronto fraudsters had included a bogus Ontario driver’s license bearing an Internet-scalped picture of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar.

While most recipients trash e-mail messages, Kelly said criminals “also do mass mailings,” offering lottery winnings, jokes, religious text, news, stock and crime alerts, and dating and marriage services. Despite many computers having spam-detectors, “phishing” messages seeking money, bank account, passport or credit card information to help supposed friends or relatives are constantly sent.
Even when cash promises crash, some victims reply to requests for more funds to overcome unforeseen problems.

Investigators traditionally regarded greed as a sucker’s failing, but Kelly said many victims “need to believe someone out there loves them” — especially with the leading plague of romance scams that cost Canadians more than $12 million last year. “Victims also say they needed money so badly, to keep the lights on or pay debts,” he added.

Canada has long been home to “boiler-room” bases for targeting Americans, due to heftier U.S. penalties and crooks believing police wouldn’t cross borders.

But Schultz said co-operation and information-sharing increased and the penalties got tougher after President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Jean Chretien met in 1997.
The long arm of the law now has a longer reach and computer-tracing has improved, according to police.

Lastly, regardless of what is written or said, if an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.
•People can report thefts or fraud to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at antifraudcentre.ca or 1-888-495-

Inside Job - Gift Card Fraud

October 2012

Gift card fraud exploits security gaps in authorization processes. If your employer or client issues gift cards, do you know the kinds of scams fraudsters might attempt?

A young man walked into a Sony retail store in Central Valley, New York not long ago. With the help of a salesperson, he selected a wide-screen television, a sound system and a laptop. The total cost of these items was nearly five figures.

"And what payment method will you use today?" the salesperson asked as they approached the counter.

"A couple of gift cards," the customer said, presenting them.

The salesperson, who happened to be the store manager, looked at him for a moment. "Let's see how much is on them," she said. Running the first card through a special reader, she squinted at the display, and passed the card through again. After double-checking the second card as well, she told the customer, "Each of these is supposedly worth $5,000." She laid both cards on the counter and wrote their serial numbers on a scrap of paper.

"Yup," the man said. "Everything alright?"

"These are extraordinarily large denomination cards. So I have to ask you for some identification," the manager replied.

"Absolutely," the customer said, patting his pockets as he snatched up both cards. "But I think I left my wallet in the car."

"I see," the manager answered. "I'll be back in a moment."

Inside a black glass dome on the ceiling above the service counter, one of the store's digital video recorders took in the entire scene. It captured no sound, but was placed to view both sides of the counter. Nearby, other cameras took side-profile footage of that area and the entire store.

These devices recorded how, when the manager turned away, the customer quickly left the store and blended into the crowd of passing shoppers. A moment later, the manager was on the phone to Sony's corporate office in New Jersey. Soon she was reading the serial number of each card to Lynn Schiess, CFE, LPQ, LPC, who at that time was a fraud specialist in Sony's loss prevention unit. (Schiess now is a loss prevention auditor with apparel manufacturer Lacoste.)

Schiess discovered that the cards had been purchased recently in a nearby store that had been closed for more than a year. That just didn't add up. Clearly, someone — perhaps an employee in another store — had coded the cards in an unorthodox manner, which cast doubt on whether Sony had ever received payment for them. As Schiess would eventually learn, Sony's internal controls at the time didn't provide for post-transaction assessments of how customers had paid for gift cards. And that turned out to be a major unmitigated fraud risk.

Schiess didn't have much to go on in attempting to track down the culprit(s). She watched the video footage of the young man in the store and realized that by itself the recording was useless for identification purposes. So, Schiess and her supervisor began reviewing exactly how store employees loaded cash values on gift cards in the amounts that individual customers requested and how they initially configured the cash-loading devices.

She knew that each store had one or more machines for activating and adding cash value to cards. But she couldn't figure out how someone could have used an activation machine for a closed store to create two gift cards whose cash value had probably been falsified. The answer to this puzzle became clear, however, when a co-worker Schiess didn't know all that well became unusually chatty with her.

THE CURIOSITY FACTOR

Schiess and her colleagues in the corporate office relied on an IT technician for help with their PCs or applications. This bright employee knew that Schiess' team investigated fraud in Sony stores.

The IT technician, after five years on the job, had mastered the help desk and had been given additional responsibilities. However, unbeknownst to Schiess, the technician's recently expanded role included maintaining a supply of — and initially configuring — the devices that stores used to activate gift cards and add cash value to them.

Part of that preparatory process included assigning to a machine a unique store identification code and running a test transaction on a gift card to confirm the machine would operate properly in the store. After the technician had determined that a card machine was working and had sent it off to a store, standard operating procedure called for him to remove the cash value from the card he had used, which remained in his possession. And therein lay another fraud risk: At that time Sony internal controls didn't require tracking the serial numbers of the cards on which the technician had performed these test transactions.

Soon after the unidentified customer tried to use the bogus cards, the help desk technician began to frequently stop by the loss prevention unit "just to chat," which he had never done before. Schiess thought this was odd but not necessarily suspicious. Regardless, she mentioned it to her supervisor, who had worked in loss prevention for decades.

"[My supervisor] immediately interpreted our help desk guy's behavior as a red flag," Schiess recalled. "In his experience, some fraudsters had drawn attention to themselves by trying to find out whether investigators knew about their fraud."

So Schiess and her supervisor visited the IT department head on the chance that the technician's behavior might be related to the falsified gift cards. When they told him about the case, he immediately brought up the technician's new and pivotal role in the gift card process and agreed to keep an eye on the technician while Schiess pursued her investigation.

Schiess' next priority was to confirm the identity of everyone involved in the attempted fraudulent redemption. She now had a credible fraud theory — one that focused on an employee in the corporate office, not in a store — and she set out to find evidence supporting or disproving that theory.

FAMILIAR FACE

Schiess' investigation continued with a background check on the IT technician, including an online search for information about him and people with whom he associated. When she discovered he had a Facebook account with a public profile and photos, she immediately recognized a face she had seen in the video of the attempt to use the $5,000 gift cards. The bogus customer and the IT technician were friends. Next step: perform an admission-seeking interview.

Schiess and her supervisor confronted the technician with this evidence. He promptly confessed and vented his pent-up resentment against the company, which he felt had denied him a raise and bonus that his hard work more than justified.

Not long after he began working with gift cards, he said, he had come across the unique identification code of the closed store.

Soon thereafter, an operational store needed a gift card activation machine. At that point, the fraud triangle's three components (pressure, rationalization, opportunity) coalesced in the IT technician's mind. He already was motivated to seek revenge and had fully rationalized his moral entitlement to it. Now, with a tempting opportunity to commit lucrative fraud in what he perceived as a low-risk situation, the technician launched his rash, short-lived plan.

This is how he did it. Just before legitimately configuring the activation machine, the technician temporarily assigned the closed store's code to it and fraudulently issued himself two unfunded $5,000 cards. He then changed the store code to that of the operational store and sent the machine off to it. There was no audit trail to follow; only he knew he had "borrowed" the activation machine to give himself a $10,000 gift. Feeling confident, he then recruited his friend to convert the cards into assets they could keep for their own use or sell for a tidy, illegitimate profit.

Schiess' supervisor obtained a signed confession from the IT technician, and then Sony pressed charges and terminated him. Ultimately, he received probation. Sony had suffered no loss, but Schiess was acutely aware that serendipity had played much too large a role in solving the case.

"It was pure luck that this fraudster was nervous enough to draw attention to himself and careless enough to use as an accomplice someone whose photo was on the technician's public Facebook page," she said. "I knew we needed better controls and risk assessment reports to help us keep tabs on these exposures. Otherwise, frauds like this would continue to occur."

DÉJÀ VU WITH A TWIST

A year after the above case, business appeared to proceed normally in another Sony store. Anyone looking at soundless footage from its security camera over the sales counter would have seen the store manager, in plain view, using a gift card activation machine connected to a point-of-sale (POS) register. And he wasn't alone; other employees also were visible nearby, interacting with the manager. It seemed as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening — even though the manager was in the process of stealing $280,000 worth of gift cards.

He didn't know it, but Sony had taken the previous gift card fraud seriously and had greatly improved internal controls. Schiess and her colleagues in the finance and IT departments had created reports to identify indications of potential gift card fraud whenever they appeared.

Sony expected the reports to cover an important security flaw in the company's gift card activation and POS systems. Management had decided that the cost of a hardware upgrade to eliminate the flaw was greater than any losses the exposure would allow. They reasoned that the reports would alert Schiess to any such frauds. And indeed the reports detected and flagged the manager's fraud — but not immediately.

Although the company knew of the security flaw, the manager had discovered it by accident. One day, about a week before his fraud began, the manager was legitimately activating a gift card for a customer. The customer presented a credit card to cover the funding for the gift card, but the customer's credit card issuer denied the transaction. Because the customer didn't have enough cash to pay for the gift card, the manager cancelled the gift card transaction, returned the gift card to the usual storage cabinet and gave it no further thought.

However, a few days later, another customer asked to buy a gift card, and the manager used the same card he had cancelled earlier. When he began to add cash value to it he discovered that the value he thought he had erased was still on the card — even though Sony had received no funding for it. The stunned manager put the card aside and activated another for the current customer. Then the manager began planning a fraud in which he would intentionally initiate and cancel gift card activations after adding large amounts of cash value to the cards. His fatal flaw was to assume that the company was unaware of the security flaw he had discovered by accident.

At first, the manager fraudulently added relatively small amounts to gift cards. No one inquired about these transactions, so he plunged ahead. In just one week, he issued himself $280,000 in illegitimate, unfunded gift cards. Well before he finished his spree, however, a report tipped Schiess off to the high number of gift card cancellations in the manager's store. She reviewed the store's security video and saw the manager processing stacks of gift cards with nary a customer in sight.

"He just went wild and fraudulently activated more than 100 cards," Schiess said.

Other employees, who were arranging displays and performing similar routine tasks, had no idea the boss was stealing. But Schiess combined intelligence from reports and video and knew exactly what the manager was doing. She alerted the finance department, which deactivated the falsified cards before anyone could use them. The manager confessed, and Sony reported the fraud to law enforcement, who arrested him.

"We learned from our experience," Schiess said. "Improving internal controls saved us from incurring a huge loss. And our discovery and prosecution of these frauds might have deterred other employees from committing similar abuses."

Reporting Scams and Frauds

If you have not lost any money and have not provided personal or financial information (relating to a fraud or scam), and you simply want to inform the appropriate organizations, report it to the Canadian Anti-fraud Centre by calling 1-888-495-8501

If you received a fraudulent e-mail soliciting personal or financial information (phishing scam), you should also advise the financial institution or other agency whose name was used.

If you are a victim of fraud or if you unwittingly provided personal or financial information (identity fraud), follow the steps in our Victim Assistance Guide.

If you are a victim of fraud and it is not related to identity fraud, contact the police service of jurisdiction in your area.

Always report fraud to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at info@antifraudcentre.ca or by dialing 1-888-495-8501 or on-line by visiting the CAFC website.

Growing number of stolen IDs used to get real passports: RCMP

Criminals are increasingly using stolen social insurance numbers and doctored birth certificates to obtain legitimate driver's licences and passports, an internal RCMP report says.

And by leveraging pilfered or forged identity markers into higher-value IDs, criminals can sidestep tough anti-counterfeiting features built into government-issued identity documents, including a pending upgrade of passports with biometric chips.

"Identities are being overtaken, altered or created, facilitating a number of other crimes, including many variations of fraud, typically for financial gain or to conceal a true identity," says the March 2011 report prepared by the RCMP's criminal intelligence division.

It points to a rising use of "breeder" documents -- identity records such as social insurance numbers, birth or citizenship certificates -- that are stolen, tampered with or falsified, then used to sign up for credit cards or valid forms of identity.

The report suggests Ottawa's recent move to stop issuing SIN cards, instead sending the information in a letter, may not hinder identity thieves who skim someone's mail or pick through their garbage looking for the nine-digit number.

The report says the failure of governments to cross-check the authenticity of personal documents used in applications allows fraudsters to stitch together a "synthetic" identity, often combining a stolen social insurance number or altered birth certificate with a made-up name and date of birth.

That means a social insurance number can be successfully paired with an entirely different name on a government application form, since the two are not routinely checked for a match, it says.
And online applications make it easier for criminals to avoid face-to-face interactions when committing identity fraud, the report notes.

Though obtaining credit cards is the number 1 goal for fraudsters, they're also exploiting gaps in the way numerous official identity documents are issued -- or using existing cards with no security features or photo -- to acquire a federal passport or provincial driver's license, according to the RCMP research.

"There are too many ID cards/documents in circulation. More documents lead to more standards, which opens the door to more fraud," the report says, adding organized crime groups seize upon identity-protection shortfalls.

A censored copy of the report obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act does not contain statistics on how common the fraud tactic is, but estimates suggest it is growing rapidly along with other forms of identity crime.

Getting the provincial and federal governments on the same page when checking someone's identity is a big undertaking that nonetheless needs tackling, said Lindsay Lee, director of the Canadian Identity Theft Support Centre, which runs a hotline for identity fraud victims.

"There's no unified system for (governments) to check everything across the board. It's really challenging to get everyone in line," she said."It's just a big jumble right now."

Some 17,000 Canadians lost more than $13-million to identity fraud last year, twice the dollar loss reported in 2007, according to figures collected by the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, a federal organization which tracks identity crime.

But the real total is likely higher due to under-reporting, the RCMP report says, citing a 2008 survey by Hamilton's McMaster University that found only 13 per cent of identity fraud cases are reported to police.

Lee said one simple step Ottawa and the provinces could take is to start partly blanking out social insurance numbers in government letters, just as credit card numbers are hidden on receipts.
Having a credit check done at least once a year and keeping an eye out for missing bills are two ways people can protect themselves against the more than two-dozen types of identity crime, she said.
And once bills and government letters have been read? "Shred them."

RCMP Sgt. Luce Normandin is helping draft a national identity crime strategy. She says the plan aims to boost awareness among governments, businesses and Canadians themselves and cut down identity theft rates.

"Hopefully the community as a whole becomes more sensitive to the fact (of ID fraud)," she said.
"We don't feel targeted as much as we maybe sometimes are."


Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/growing-number-of-stolen-ids-used-to-get-real-passports-rcmp-1.948404#ixzz2605y7BpC

Ontario private eyes accused of fraud nabbed in Caribbean

Two Canadian private eyes accused of defrauding divorce and business clients have been nabbed by police in the Caribbean where they have been island hopping for three years.

Cullen Johnson is a former aide to a Toronto police chief. Elaine White, his wife and partner in alleged crime, once worked for forensic accountants in Toronto. They are in a Turks and Caicos jail awaiting a hearing Friday.

A Toronto Star investigation in 2009 exposed an unusual scheme: Both were accused by former clients (and later the police) of forging and selling bank records that made clients believe an ex-spouse, friend or employee had millions of dollars stashed offshore. One case involved a group of lottery winning friends led to believe one of their group swindled the others.

Shortly after the pair pleaded not guilty to fraud charges in Newmarket court in late December 2009, they flew south and set up shop in the Bahamas, calling their new private-eye company Internal Affairs Global, boasting a crack investigation squad that could pierce any banking veil.

On Wednesday, immigration agents in the Turks and Caicos arrested Johnson, 64, and White, 69. Police in Ontario say the pair had overstayed their Turks’ visa. A routine check turned up warrants for their arrest filed internationally by the Ontario Provincial Police, stories in the Toronto Star and their Panamanian-based website.

“Our folks are in touch with the authorities in the Turks,” said OPP spokesman Sgt. Peter Leon.
He said the OPP is exploring options to get them back in Ontario. Extradition is one option, but there may be an easier route. “The (Turks government) may deport them. If we know they are coming, we will be waiting for them.”

The Star’s probe of Johnson and White turned up a series of authentic looking bank statements sent to numerous clients for a fee.

In one case, well-respected former Ontario Liberal MPP Eric Cunningham was a target. Cunningham and his wife were in court on divorce proceedings in 2005. In a case that took years, his ex-wife presented banking documents obtained from the detectives that made it look like the former MPP was a wealthy man with assets offshore, an incredible $2.3 million in accounts flung as far as the Cook Islands, Panama, the Bahamas, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands.

All false, two judges said, vindicating Cunningham. But the case took a financial toll on him as he had to pay lawyers for years to defend his case. His ex-wife’s father funded most of the investigation of Cunningham, but private eyes cooked up the false documents.

In Cunningham’s case and others, the detectives are accused of doing a sort of financial striptease for clients, showing clients (his ex-wife in this case) more and more documents depending on how much they paid in fees. The Holy Grail which clients would finally get (all forged) was the signature card “proving” who had opened the offshore account.

Cunningham said Wednesday he is cautiously pleased. “The wheels of justice grind, but they grind slowly,” said Cunningham, a communications consultant who said he would be happily retired were it not for Internal Affairs.

The Star stories revealed how the Ontario government has little control over the private investigators it licenses. Not much has changed since then, though a top official lost his job.

In another case, four Toronto Catholic School Board employees who were good friends routinely played the same lottery numbers, hoping to make a big score and retire early. One day, one of the four did a random check of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. website and learned the group’s ticket had won $5.7 million six months earlier.

Suspicious of the friend who had checked the number at a convenience store, the group hired Internal Affairs. A “banking sweep” turned up records that appeared to show the friend had won, and sent the money offshore to Barbados and Switzerland. The group confronted their friend who said the convenience store owner had told her they did not win
.
An investigation turned out that the store owner was the thief, and he had closed his shop, bought a mansion, a Tim Hortons franchise for his son and several cars. The lottery corporation reimbursed the four friends and the store owner pleaded guilty to fraud.

Johnson and White are also believed by investigators to be behind a series of forged documents that suggest federal minister Julian Fantino, Cunningham, other politicians and a “yellow” journalist at the Star are involved in a bizarre, fictitious financial conspiracy called “Superstar Corruption.”

In a previous interview by email in 2010, Johnson both attacked the Star’s credibility and protested his innocence. In other correspondence, Johnson has mused about his predicament, unable to come home to see family.

“I’ve always liked the Kenny Rogers ballad, ‘The Gambler.’ Good advice. Know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em,” Johnson wrote to the Star at one point. He ended on a cheery note. “As they say at McDonald’s, “Have a nice day!”

Nearly half of Canadians report hacker attacks

OTTAWA — Whether it's by viruses, worms or phishing emails and texts, nearly half of all Canadians have been targeted by hackers at some point over the past year, according to a new report from an anti-virus software company.

The 2012 Norton Cyber-crime Report, released Wednesday, says more than 46 per cent of Canadians have re-ported attempts by hackers to try to obtain personal data over the past 12 months.

More than 8.3 million Canadians report they have been victims of cybercrime in the past year and 42 per cent of Canadian adults say they wouldn't know if their computer, tablet or phone was infected with a virus unless it crashed or slowed down dramatically.

Canadian's aren't being singled out, according to the re-port, which collected data from 24 countries.
More than 46 per cent of global respondents also re-ported that hackers had tried to coerce sensitive information from them within the past 12 months.

Despite new anti-virus soft-ware and tougher laws to protect consumers, hackers are becoming more dangerous than ever. According to the Norton study, hackers have started mining social net-works such as Facebook and have added new tools that al-low them to exploit software flaws on phones, tablets and computers in their attempts to scoop up more personal in-formation.
When those high-tech approaches aren't enough, hackers are turning to low-tech methods to implant computers with viruses and other nasty computer pro-grams.

In January, a scam in which callers pretending to be Microsoft employees offered to solve computer problems accounted for 70 per cent of all fraud complaints in Canada, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

The callers offered to help people clean a virus from their hard drives. In the process, they charged victims as much as $400, collected credit card information and gained access to personal files on the victims' computers.

Hacking accounted for more than $1.4 billion in losses to Canadians over the past 12 months, the study estimates.

Lynn Hargrove, Canadian director of consumer solutions for Symantec Corp., which publishes Norton anti-virus software, said consumers are becoming more savvy at preventing hackers from gaining access to their computers. But hackers are increasingly turning their attention to mo-bile phones and devices, especially as more people use cellular phones for banking and making electronic payments.

"Cyber criminals are looking at new ways to attack, and mobile is a really big platform that we are seeing," she said. "Obviously, that's a place that cyber criminals are going to attack. Cyber criminals are going to go where the biggest bang for their buck is."

Mobile has become the new frontier for hackers eager to collect bank account and credit card data from individuals. According to Norton, as many as 16 per cent of Canadians re-ported falling victim to mobile fraud over the past 12 months. That number could skyrocket as hackers further target mobile devices.

"It's a much different landscape," said Hargrove. "As we are seeing more cybercrime on a mobile de-vice, 54 per cent of Canadians are re-porting that they are accessing the Internet on that device and 74 per cent of Canadians don't have mobile security."

Hargrove said that 59 per cent of survey respondents were unaware that security programs exist for their mobile devices.

The study was released just days after hackers made public person-al information from more than one million iPhone and other Apple de-vices. The hackers claim to have personal information from more than 11 million mobile devices and say they may release more data in the coming weeks.

Last week, another group of hackers publicly released the bank records and personal credit histories of more than a million people. The hackers, who claim the data theft and subsequent posting of the in-formation on the Internet is a form of protest against big business and the banks, have promised that the release was only the first wave of a broader release.

The 2012 Norton Cybercrime Re-port is in its third year of publication. The survey asked questions of 13,018 online respondents from 24 countries, including 500 from Canada. The margin of error for the study results is plus 0.9 per cent at the 95 per cent level of confidence.

CYBERCRIME NUMBERS

Number of reported cybercrime victims in past 12 months
■ 8.3 million (Canada)
■ 556 million (global)
Online adults who have reported experiencing cybercrime
■ 46 per cent (Canada)
■ 46 per cent (global)
Total net costs of cybercrime
■ $1.4 billion (Canada)
■ $110 billion US (global)
Social network users who do not check links before sharing them with others
■ 15 per cent (Canada)
■ 20 per cent (global)
Online adults who don't understand the risk of cybercrime or how to protect themselves online
■ 21 per cent (Canada)
■ 28 per cent (global)

Source: 2012 Norton Cybercrime Report