Internet fraud cost Americans USD 3.5 mln in 2019, FBI says

The report suggests that out of the successful internet scams, the main focus is on phishing, BEC, and other defrauding schemes that have proven to work, while ransomware continues to take a big financial toll on victims. The FBI’s Internet Crime Report says that although the number of ransomware attacks decreased in 2019, the amount of loses increased.

As such, businesses and individuals lost USD 3.5 billion to cybercriminals in 2019. Moreover, Threat Post reveals that people reported 467,361 complaints of cybercrime to the FBI in 2019 — an average of nearly 1,300 incidents every day, which represents over 100,000 more than the year prior. Also, business email compromise (BEC), romance or confidence fraud, and spoofing (mimicking the account of someone known to the victim to gather personal or financial information) are the crimes that defraud people and businesses out of the most money. BEC or email account compromise cost people USD 1.7 billion in 2019, while the FBI received 23,775 reports of these scams.