According to the new edition of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report, 298,728 complaints were received in 2016 totaling more than $1.3 billion in financial loss.
The annual FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3 was released on Thursday, it provides figures about most prevalent forms of cyber crimes today.
Online extortion, tech support scams and Business Email Compromise scams (BECs) continues to be the most costly criminal activities reported by consumers and businesses. Figures reported in the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report are related to 2016.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) and individual Email Account Compromise (EAC) scams accounted for more 25% of the total financial loss (around $360.5 million) despite they represented only a very small proportion of Internet crime reported in 2016 ( 12,005 incidents in 2016). This data confirms that both BEC and EAC are profitable activities for crooks.
BEC scams are evolving and the report includes requests for PII and age and Tax Statement (W-2) forms for employees.
“BECs may not always be associated with a request for transfer of funds. In 2016, the scam evolved to include the compromise of legitimate business email accounts and requests for Personally Identifiable
Information (PII) or Wage and Tax Statement (W-2) forms for employees.” states the report.
The three online crimes that were most commonly reported to IC3 in 2016 were non-payment and non-delivery incidents (81,029 incidents), personal data breaches (27,573), and 419/overpayment scams (25,716).
The IC3 received 17,146 extortion-related complaints that account for over $15 million financial loss. A close look at the extortion-related complaints revealed that 2,673 complaints were ransomware-based attacks that accounted for $2.4 million losses.
This data could be just the tip of the iceberg considering that the majority of the victims don’t report the crime to law enforcement.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report highlights that only 15 percent of the US victims report their crimes to the authorities. For 2016, 298,728 complaints were received, with a total victim loss of $1.33 billion.
Let me suggest reading the report, it is one of the most interesting documents related to Internet crimes and is full of data. I personally believe that this edition of the report is the best one since now, it is well organized and data are aggregated in a way to be easily analyzed.
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(Security Affairs – Internet Crime Complaint Center report 2016, cybercrime)
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