Whether you’re checking your email, browsing through your friend’s updates on Facebook, spending a few nights in a hotel, looking for work, use online banking to pay your bills, or if you’re just hanging out at home minding your own business, you are susceptible to being scammed. In fact, these circumstances have provided the ideal backdrop for scammers to come in and purposely mislead people, resulting in computer viruses, identity theft, debt, and having money stolen directly from bank accounts and credit cards.

The Better Business Bureau has collected the 10 most popular scams that have plagued millions over the past year alone; a novel idea considering BBB was the top scam of the year, with emails going out to small business owners claiming that a complaint had been made against their business. I have actually received that email a ton of times, along with a few other email phishing scams, but thankfully they all wound up in my spam folder and I was never made a victim because of them.

Check out the following infographic for information about the top 10 scams of 2011, who they targeted, and what the result of each scam is.

Top 10 Scams of 2011 [Infographic] compliments of Better Business Bureau

Click image to enlarge in new window

How many of these scams have you heard of or been affected by?