Some 43,000 filed internet scam police reports last year

The police received about 43 thousand reports of internet scams in 2014. Most of them involved buying and selling frauds with phones and entrance tickets for concerts, events and theme parks. "Scammers operate mainly through online trading sites such as Marktplaats, but we also see more and more gangs who reproduce known web shops as precisely as possible, but with a name that is very, very similar." said Gijs van der Linden, head of the National Reporting Point Internet Scams. The police removed 160 fake online stores from the web last year. Van der Linden advises anyone making an online transaction to use the police's check function, where fraudulent sellers, buyers, web shops and websites' information is collected. With this function buyers can search account numbers, email addresses, phone numbers or websites to see if it is known to the police. Van der Linden also calls on victims of internet scam to always report it to the police. The police use these reports to detect patterns and trace scammers. "Filing a report always makes sense. It could lead to a big case."