The FBI’s annual internet crime report for the 2023 year (PDF) was released last month. The report is based on data collected by the IC3 – the “Internet Crime Complaint Center” – run by the FBI.
Key takeaways from the 2023 report:
- 40% of lifetime complaints in the past four years (out of 23 total)
IC3 was established in May 2000 – so it has collected crime statistics for 23 years. Over those 23 years, the IC3 has received over 8 million complaints. In each of the last four years, the average annual number of complaints was around 800,000, meaning that 40% of total complaints over 23 years were received in the last four years. There was a significant jump from the year pre-covid (2019, 467K complaints) to the first year of covid (2020, 792K complaints). - $50 million BEC (business email compromise) incident
The report includes an anonymized case study of a New York firm that suffered a $50 million BEC incident. Due to the rapid intervention of the FBI and its various units, $46 million of that was recovered. Overall, BEC incidents were the second most costly incident type reported to the FBI, at $2.9 billion. - Hardly anyone is reporting costly ransomware incidents to the FBI
Only 2,825 complaints were reported, with losses pegged at $59.6 million, or just over $20,000 per incident. I thought the loss numbers would be higher. This is either due to underreporting of costly incidents or the non-existence of costly incidents (which seems out of place with other reporting). - Phishing incidents remain the most commonly reported crime type …
Out of 880,418 complaints in 2023, 298,878 were of the phishing / spoofing type (34% of total). This is a consistent pattern in the data reported to the FBI. - … but it’s not the most costly crime type that’s reported
That title belongs to investment fraud (1st place, $4.6 billion), business email compromise (2nd place, $2.9 billion), and tech support scams (3rd place, $0.9 billion).
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