The Austin-Round Rock area ranks fifth out of all U.S. metro areas for fraud complaints, according to the Federal Trade Commission. At the top of the list are complaints about the Internet.

"High-tech people, probably more than the average person, like to play around with things like E-bay," Andrew Whinston, director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas, said.

There are some pretty useful loopholes for sellers to defraud the public, Whinston said.

Take E-bay's reputation system. It allows buyers to rate sellers on customer service and product quality. But now the sellers are using it to their advantage by posing as buyers.

"When the buyer and the seller are the same, the buyer getting the product, which is basically no transaction, will give the seller a high rating or the highest rating possible," Whinston said.

		WATCH THE VIDEO
	Fraud reports The FTC says Internet complaints top the lists of fraud reports.

That allows some sellers to auction off shoddy merchandise or not follow through on sales under the guise of quality.

But buyers can get pretty sneaky too by threatening to give sellers low reputation ratings if they don't cough up deeper discounts than advertised.

Austinites aren't just complaining about Internet auction fraud either. They're also concerned over bogus foreign money offers, shop-at-home scams, sweepstakes, lottery frauds and shoddy Internet service providers.