Police Grapple With Cybercrime

As crime is increasingly moving online, state and local police -- who have spent decades refining how to track down murderers, thieves and drug dealers -- are having a hard time keeping up.

"It probably is one of the most perplexing questions right now in terms of state and local policing: How do they handle this stuff?" said Richard McFeely, who recently stepped down as the top cybersecurity official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "We're not generally working these cases. We need to get out ahead of this." In 2012, consumers reported $525 million in damages to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a group run partly by the FBI that collects data on cybercrimes, including fraud, hacking and identity theft. That was an 8% increase from the prior year.