Cross Border Fraud

It doesn't surprise me that scammers come from locations outside the U.S. That's what makes it harder to find and prosecute them. It happens but not very often. Here are some statistics that reflect the problem of scammers outside the U.S. targeting victims inside the U.S. These statistics represent "foreign businesses" so it doesn't even include all the scammers where their address could not be determined (I acutally think that is most scams - want scammer actually wants to be found?), scammers just pretending to buy something or the whole inheritance scam.
 
Recent FTC statistics suggest:

- Between 2006 and 2011, almost half a million U.S. consumers (471,014) complained about transactions involving over $1.4 billion paid to businesses in other countries.

- The number of U.S. consumer complaints against foreign businesses exceeded 100,000 in 2011 alone.

- Cross-border complaints have accounted for more than 10% of all Consumer Sentinel fraud complaints every year since 2000, with a high of 22% in 2006 and 13% for each of the last three years. These numbers likely understate the scope of the problem, as this complaint count includes only those instances where consumers report a foreign address.

- U.S. consumers complain about foreign businesses from an increasingly broad range of countries. In 2002 over 55% of such complaints were about Canadian businesses; in 2011 over 85% were about businesses in other foreign countries.