The FBI’s annual Internet Crime Report reveals staggering losses of $12.5 billion to cybercrime in 2023, marking a $2 billion increase from the previous year, with investment fraud and compromised email accounts as major contributors.
The FBI evaluated all of the complaints submitted through its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and published its annual Internet Crime Report in April. Despite the number of complaints less than double compared to four years previously, the Bureau’s analysis shows that damages related to cybercrime complaints were $12.5 billion in 2023, up $2 billion year over year and more than quadruple the amount recorded in 2019.
Based on statistics from the report, as seen in the graphic below by Statista’s Florian Zandt, claimed losses from cybercrime climbed dramatically starting in 2021.
Even while complaints increased in 2021, there was only a slight year-over-year increase in losses of about $700 million; nevertheless, the losses from 2021 to 2022 increased significantly. This implies that thieves were able to take more money unlawfully from each breach.
The majority of the money was lost to investment fraud and compromised corporate email accounts. About 60% of all reported thefts were linked to these two attack routes. Even if these numbers are already high, the FBI can only examine instances that are submitted through its platform, thus the true numbers could be far higher.
The data also demonstrates a blatant geographic distribution bias, with 521,652 complaints coming from the US and 288,355 from the UK. When focusing on US instances, the majority of complaints came from Florida, Texas, and California. In terms of money lost, the former also came in first place with $2.1 billion, or 17% of the total recorded worldwide. Nigeria (1,779), India (3,405), and Canada (6,601) had the highest complaint prevalences outside of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Recently, GreatGameIndia reported that the Department of Justice announced in a news release that Chinese national Wang Yunhe, 35, has been arrested for operating the world’s largest botnet, named “911 S5.”
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