The Federal Trade Commission yesterday in a press release published figures saying 30.2 million Americans or 13.5% of U.S. adults fell victim to fraud. Not surprisingly, e-mail was used to deliver a significant percentage of the pitches—22% to be exact.
A quick check of the report behind the press release, however, revealed that the survey the release was based on was done in the fall of 2005.
Umm. I know deadlines are tough, but two years?
We live in a world where scammers pop their heads up in our inboxes every single day. They change their tactics seemingly by the minute. One day, they’re sending their pitches in PDFs, the next it’s MP3s. And the FTC is publishing figures from 2005?
Where has this study been for two years? Was it stalled in the legal department? Oh, I almost forgot, the whole organization is one big legal department.
The report is 128 pages long, so it isn’t like a couple of interns tossed it together in an afternoon. Some people spent some serious time on this thing.
And it’s not like the agency is incapable of moving faster. Any company on the receiving end of one of its investigations can attest to the speed with which it can impose fines and settlements.
Previously, the FTC did a similar study in 2003 and released the results with comparative lighting speed in August 2004.
A significant change between the 2003 and the 2005 studies was the appearance of foreign lottery scams in the second survey. A whopping 3.2 million people fell for this scam in 2005, according to the FTC.
How many people fell for this scam in the intervening years is anyone’s guess, but had the FTC released the 2005 report in a more timely fashion and received the usual round of press coverage, the figure could conceivably be significantly lower as a result of increased public awareness of the scam.
Way to go, FTC.
