Investment fraud surpassed business email compromise (BEC) to become the most profitable category of cybercrime last year, costing victims more than $3.3 billion in damages in 2022, according to the FBI.
of Internet Crime Report 2022 The agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) compiles a year’s worth of reports submitted by consumers and businesses around the world.
Total cybercrime losses in 2022 were estimated at $10.3 billion based on nearly 801,000 complaints. The latter number was up 49% from the previous year’s total, but the number of complaints was actually down by more than 46,000.
Investment fraud was the clear winner for cybercriminals, with profits soaring 127% year over year. According to the FBI, crypto-related fraud losses increased further from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion in 2022 (183%).
Read more about investment fraud here: Investment Fraud Will Cause $9 Billion in Fraud in 2022
Elsewhere, the technical support category surged up the rankings, taking third place in total losses. Last year the cyber crook earned him $806.6 million, up 132% year-on-year.
This is ahead of romance scams and personal data breaches in fourth and fifth place respectively. The category of breaches grew 44% to a loss of more than $742 million, while romance fraud shrank 23% to a loss of nearly $736 million.
Despite losing its status as the highest-grossing cybercrime type, BEC has grown by more than 14%, reaching an estimated loss of over $2.7 billion in 2022. The FBI says malicious actors are increasingly spoofing legitimate business phone numbers to verify fraudulent banking details on victims. .
In the last five years alone, IC3 has processed over 3.2 million complaints related to $27.6 billion in losses. Last year was the first year that the number of complaints actually decreased.
IC3 received 2,385 ransomware complaints last year, with an estimated loss of $34.4 million. However, these numbers are likely just the tip of the iceberg, many ransomware breaches go unreported, and loss estimates do not include business, time, wages, files, equipment, or Does not include loss of third party repair services.
Phishing remained the most common form of cybercrime, despite a slight decline in the number of complaints (-7%) to just over 300,000 for the year.
