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WHEN project executive Juanne Tan received a Facebook message from a friend in August last year, it never crossed her mind that she was being targeted by a sexual predator.
Posing as Miss Tan's friend, the predator tricked her into giving him her Facebook and e-mail passwords.
He then told Miss Tan, 19, that if she wanted her passwords back, she would have to show him her topless body via a webcam.
"I immediately changed my Facebook password and, when he realised what I had done, he started to get angry," she said, adding that the predator later locked her out of her e-mail account.
Miss Tan's experience was far from being an isolated incident, going by a study of 24 countries released yesterday.
The report showed that Singapore was ranked as the No. 2 country where netizens were hit most by online threats from sexual predators.
The annual study, called the Cybercrime Report, said that 18 per cent of Internet users here have been threatened by online sexual predators.
This was much higher than the global average of about 9 per cent.
Only India was ahead of Singapore with 19 per cent.
This is the first time the threat posed by online sexual predators has made it into the top five prevalent forms of cybercrime here.
The study was conducted from February to March by Internet security firm Symantec, which polled 15,000 Internet users aged 18 and above. Of these, 500 came from Singapore.
The report also showed that most Singaporeans - 90 per cent - were as angry about cybercrime as they were about real-life crime.
This was much higher than the average of 68 per cent for other countries.
On this count, Singapore ranked fourth in the study, behind top-ranked China, Mexico and South Africa.
Cybercrimes here are also on the rise, with 80 per cent of Singaporeans having fallen prey to them before, compared to 70 per cent from last year.
Computer viruses and malware were found to be the most prevalent form of cybercrime in Singapore, with 64 per cent of respondents saying so.
More than 1.2 million people here were hit by cybercrimes, costing the country US$870 million (S$1 billion) last year, Symantec said.
The report also found that Singaporean men were more prone to falling victim to cybercrime than their peers overseas. This was because Singaporean men spent more time online - 31 hours a week on average. The global weekly average for men was 24 hours.
Also, more men here compared to women - 72 per cent of men versus 57 per cent of women - downloaded computer viruses or malware accidentally.
This was a result of four times more men than women accessing pornography online.
