(Trends Wide) — More than $10 billion in losses from online scams were reported to the FBI in 2022, the highest annual loss in the past five years, according to a new report from the bureau of investigations.
The more than $3 billion increase in online fraud reports from 2021 to 2022 was fueled by the fact that cryptocurrency investment fraud reports nearly tripled, the FBI said in its annual Internet Crime Report.
The report brings together a wide variety of fraud allegations, from marketing scams to ransomware, and is a metric for US lawmakers to gauge how much hacking and other schemes are costing the US economy.
While people in their 30s filed the most fraud reports last year, the burden of many digital scams fell on older people. People age 60 and older accounted for $724 million, or more than two-thirds of the reported losses from “call center fraud,” according to the FBI. Such fraud occurs when scammers call someone posing as tech support or government agencies.
Ransomware, which locks up computers until hackers are paid, accounted for about $34 million in adjusted losses reported to the FBI last year. The relatively modest number compared to other forms of fraud could be due to the fact that many victim organizations still do not report ransomware attacks to the FBI.
A popular type of ransomware called Hive was used in 87 attacks last year, according to the FBI. The bureau seized computing infrastructure from Hive operatives earlier this year, but not before ransomware-affiliated hackers extorted more than $100 million from hospitals, schools and other victims around the world.
While ransomware tends to make headlines, a different hacking scheme known as business email compromise (BEC) results in much more money being stolen from victims combined. A BEC scheme typically involves someone tricking a victim into wireing money to them, often by posing as a customer or relative.
One of the most high-profile examples of BEC fraud last year cost the city of Lexington, Kentucky, about $4 million in federal funds for housing assistance.
BEC scams accounted for about $2.7 billion in adjusted losses in 2022, compared with about $2.4 billion in 2021, according to FBI data.
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(Trends Wide) — More than $10 billion in losses from online scams were reported to the FBI in 2022, the highest annual loss in the past five years, according to a new report from the bureau of investigations.
The more than $3 billion increase in online fraud reports from 2021 to 2022 was fueled by the fact that cryptocurrency investment fraud reports nearly tripled, the FBI said in its annual Internet Crime Report.
The report brings together a wide variety of fraud allegations, from marketing scams to ransomware, and is a metric for US lawmakers to gauge how much hacking and other schemes are costing the US economy.
While people in their 30s filed the most fraud reports last year, the burden of many digital scams fell on older people. People age 60 and older accounted for $724 million, or more than two-thirds of the reported losses from “call center fraud,” according to the FBI. Such fraud occurs when scammers call someone posing as tech support or government agencies.
Ransomware, which locks up computers until hackers are paid, accounted for about $34 million in adjusted losses reported to the FBI last year. The relatively modest number compared to other forms of fraud could be due to the fact that many victim organizations still do not report ransomware attacks to the FBI.
A popular type of ransomware called Hive was used in 87 attacks last year, according to the FBI. The bureau seized computing infrastructure from Hive operatives earlier this year, but not before ransomware-affiliated hackers extorted more than $100 million from hospitals, schools and other victims around the world.
While ransomware tends to make headlines, a different hacking scheme known as business email compromise (BEC) results in much more money being stolen from victims combined. A BEC scheme typically involves someone tricking a victim into wireing money to them, often by posing as a customer or relative.
One of the most high-profile examples of BEC fraud last year cost the city of Lexington, Kentucky, about $4 million in federal funds for housing assistance.
BEC scams accounted for about $2.7 billion in adjusted losses in 2022, compared with about $2.4 billion in 2021, according to FBI data.
