In 2023, the FBI’s annual report disclosed a staggering collective loss of $12.5 billion incurred by American consumers and businesses due to internet crimes. This figure represents a substantial 22% increase from the previous year, accompanied by a nearly 10% rise in the number of complaints, exceeding 880,000. The FBI emphasized that these statistics likely underestimate the actual scale of internet crimes, given that many incidents still go unreported.
Notably, investment scams once again dominated the landscape, constituting the largest proportion of internet crimes. Losses related to such scams experienced a notable surge of 38%, reaching $4.57 billion. Of particular concern is the fact that a significant portion of these losses involved cryptocurrency, witnessing a 53% increase to $3.94 billion in 2023.
Securing the second position were business email compromise crimes, where criminals compromise legitimate business accounts to deceive individuals into providing money or sensitive information. Reported losses from these incidents amounted to $2.9 billion.
Tech support scams, wherein targets are often deceived into believing their computers are infected or their software licenses have expired, saw a 15% increase in losses, reaching nearly $1 billion. Additionally, ransomware complaints reported a substantial spike of 74%, resulting in losses totaling $59.6 million.
The environmental services industry witnessed an “unprecedented surge” in HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, accounting for half of all its HTTP traffic.
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40-year-old Russian national Vladimir Dunaev has been sentenced to five years and four months in prison for his role in creating and distributing the TrickBot malware, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said.
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