Mr Branding: Cybercrime Losses Increased by 22% in 2023 According to the FBI

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Cybercrime Losses Increased by 22% in 2023 According to the FBI

Cybercrime has been a prevalent issue for quite some time now, and despite many efforts to curb it, it’s only become worse as the years have gone by. Based on information released by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, losses incurred due to cybercrime jumped by a whopping 22% in the year of 2023 alone with all things having been considered and taken into account. These losses now total over $12 billion within the span of a single year.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that there has been a 10% increase in the quantity of complaints received. What this basically means is that the total number of instances has increased by a smaller margin than the total value of the losses, indicating that each individual instance of cybercrime is becoming more financially devastating than might have been the case otherwise.

All in all, 880,418 complaints were registered in 2023. It bears mentioning that the total value of losses is a bit on the conservative side, and they may very well be higher. Over the past five years, consumers have lost a mind boggling $37.4 billion to cybercrime, and the problem doesn’t seem like it will be going away anytime soon.

Investment fraud appeared to be the worst kind of cybercrime that people reported, with losses increasing from $3.31 billion in 2022 to $4.57 billion in 2023. Just under $4 billion, or $3.94 billion to be precise, came from cryptocurrency related scams.

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Business email compromise cybercrimes came in second on this list, costing consumers $2.9 billion last year. This is when malicious actors use spoofed email accounts of suppliers or other service providers to convince businesses to send them large sums of money.

Tech support scams have also cost consumers upwards of $1.3 billion in 2023. They generally involve people receiving a message or a call falsely claiming that their system is compromised and that they need to pay to have it fixed. Pop ups claiming that a virus has infected their system are quite commonplace here.