Internet shopping fraud jumps more than 50 pct in two years

SEOUL, July 6 (Yonhap) -- The number of swindled online shoppers jumped more than 50 percent last year from two years earlier in South Korea, one of the world's most densely wired countries, police said on Wednesday. A total of 26,826 people were arrested last year on charges of duping online shoppers through a variety of fraudulent transactions in cyberspace, the National Police Agency said in data submitted to ruling party lawmaker Yoon Seok-yong. The 2010 reading was up 50.3 percent from 2009's 17,844. In 2009, a total of 22,758 people were apprehended for similar charges. From the beginning of 2011 to the end of May, police took 10,370 Internet swindlers into custody, the data said. Meanwhile, scams in transactions of virtual tools used for Internet gaming shrank 13.2 percent on-year to 9,586 cases last year, it showed. "Despite tightened crackdown efforts, telecommunication fraud has been on the rise," the lawmaker said. "Authorities should come up with measures to prevent such scams, along with other measures to keep low income earners safe from similar scams." The data came as the country was ranked first for wireless Internet penetration among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). South Korea was the leading country for wireless broadband subscriptions last year among the 34 member nations, with 89.8 per 100 people, according to the OECD. The number of subscribers to high-speed wireless Internet access services reached 45.4 million at the end of last year, it said.