It’s not the Matrix, but …

An FBI report notes that Internet fraud in the U.S. increased 33% in 2008, and a Gartner report says U.S. consumer Internet scams increased 39.8% in 2008.

The FBI’s Internet Fraud Complaint Center found that Internet-based fraud was up 33% in 2008, the first increase in three years. With the February-March 2009 period showing a 50% increase, the problem is growing.

“These numbers are shocking, but given that the vast majority of incidents go unreported, the threat of identification theft is actually much more serious than even these figures would lead us to believe,” Justin Yurek, president of ID Watchdog Inc., said in a statement.

Internet fraud includes everything from phony sales on auction and classified sites such as eBay Inc. and craigslist.com to smaller scale version of the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by disgraced New York financier Bernard Madoff. One new Internet identity theft scam involves e-mails that have the appearance of originating from the FBI or other federal agencies seeking the recipient’s bank account information in order to help with illegal wire transfer investigations, according to ID Watchdog.

The company said about 10 million Americans face some form of identity fraud each year.

Gartner, one of the world’s leading information technology research and advisory companies, said more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008, a 39.8% increase over 2007.

Phishing is typically accomplished when the hacker sends someone an e-mail with a link inside and an invitation to go to a Web site, which the thief portrays as a well-known and/or trustworthy site.

“The survey findings underline the fact that the war against phishing is far from over,” said Avivah Litan, vice president and analyst at Gartner. “Despite the rollout of a wide range of security measures designed to stem phishing, the truth is that many of them are not yet adopted widely enough to reverse this tide and, in many cases, their effectiveness is only partial.”

Some key points from the Gartner report include:

Although the number of consumers who lost money to phishing attacks increased in 2008, average losses decreased. The average consumer loss in 2008 per phishing incident was $351, a 60% decrease from the year before.

Consumers recovered 56 percent of their losses, meaning that most fraud costs were borne by consumer banks, PayPal and other financial service providers.

About 4.33% of of phishing e-mail recipients admitted to giving away sensitive information, up 45% over 2007.