Internet Crime Complaint Center
enabled by National White Collar Crime Center (NWC3)
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concerning suspected Internet-facilitated criminal activity. The IC3 gives victims a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of suspected criminal or civil violations on the Internet. The IC3 develops leads and notifies law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, local and international level. Information sent to the IC3 is analyzed and disseminated for investigative and intelligence purposes to law enforcement and for public awareness.
History
The IC3 was founded in 2000 as the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC), and was tasked with gathering data on crimes committed online such as fraud, scams, and thefts. Other crimes tracked by the center included intellectual property rights matters, computer intrusions, economic espionage, online extortion, international money laundering, identity theft, and other Internet-facilitated crimes.
With the realization that crimes facilitated online have a chance to overlap with other crimes, and that not all crimes committed or facilitated online are just fraud, the IFCC was renamed to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in October 2003 to better reflect the broad character of such matters, and to minimize the need for one to distinguish online fraud from other potentially overlapping cyber crimes.
The public source identifies “Internet Crime Complaint Center” as enabled by National White Collar Crime Center (NWC3). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Internet, Crime and Complaint.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Internet Crime Complaint Center”, the useful work is to connect “enabled by National White Collar Crime Center (NWC3)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q335553. The Library of Congress control number is no2007056606. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000 and 2003.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Internet Crime Complaint Center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.