ONE in eight people have received an offensive or harassing email in the last year, Government research said today.

The Home Office study also showed one in 11 people questioned had received a similar unpleasant message by mobile `phone text or voicemail.

Men aged 26 to 30 were most likely to be the victims of email harassment.

The report, which drew on the British Crime Survey (BCS) and the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey, found that 6.9% of people who owned a mobile phone had had it stolen in the previous year.

Software

The report Fraud and Technology Crimes, also showed:

:: Just over 18% of households with internet access said their computer had been affected by a computer virus in the previous year;

:: 15% admitted downloading pirated software or music from the internet;

:: 2.2% said someone had accessed or hacked into their computer;

:: 1.9% had visited a website on how to commit a crime;

:: Just under 1% of those aged 10 to 65 questioned for the BCS admitted they had knowingly sent a computer virus in the same period.

The questionnaires, carried out in 2002 and 2003, were "the first large-scale surveys to ask specifically about mobile phone harassment", said the report.

In all, 8.7% of mobile phone owners said they had received offensive or harassing messages - 4.2% by text message, 3.7% by voice message and 0.8% by both.

Women were more likely than men to have received offensive messages - 9.9% compared with 7.6%.