In China, games are a major source of money for online scammers

The age of online gaming that we live in is wonderful, because it allows us to connect and play with new people from all over the world. We build teams, make friends, and sometimes even marry, the people that we play with online. But unfortunately, the online gaming world also has its fair share of criminals. And in China, playing online games put you at a greater risk of being scammed than almost any other online activity.

(See: Your in-game girlfriend might be a dude, even if you’ve video-chatted with her)

A report from 12321, which is an official scam reporting service under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, shows that over the past year, more than 20% of the country’s reported online scams have been related to gaming. In fact, online gaming had more reports of scamming than any other online industry except for shopping. Gambling, phishing, e-banking, porn: all of them had lower reporting rates than online games.

Want to see how online scamming in China looks in visual form? Here’s a slightly confusing chart via Sina Games. The chart draws on data from July of 2013-July of 2014. The left vertical axis indicates the percentage of scams in a particular industry as part of the total number of reported scams during that time period, and the right vertical axis indicates the average amount of money lost per scam for scams in that industry.

The good news, though, is that the chances of getting scammed are still quite slim, and the amount of money gamers were scammed out of was, on average, lower than the money stolen by scammers in other industries. Between July of 2013 and this past July, there were 155 different online gaming scams reported, with the victims losing an average of RMB 2392 ($390). That might sound like a lot, but it’s comparatively low. Although there were less than 30 reported gambling scams, for example, victims of those scams lost an average of RMB 27652 ($4,511).

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that all of this data is incomplete, as there are likely many people who get scammed online but don’t report it, either because they’re embarrassed about being tricked or because they don’t know where/how to go about filing the report.

(via Sina Games)