April 23
By Raphael Satter
Cybercrime of all stripes cost victims globally more than $16 billion dollars last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a report released on Wednesday.
The losses – a one-third increase over 2023 – were largely driven by low tech scams, such as would-be investors swindled out of money online, or company employees tricked by deceptive emails into wiring large sums to criminals’ bank accounts. Tech support and romance scams also caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, the bureau said.
The figures were collated by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which has become a clearinghouse for reports of digital fraud and hacking, and drew on nearly 860,000 complaints, the bureau said.
Losses from cybercrime are notoriously hard to calculate. The FBI’s figures are among the most comprehensive, but the bureau acknowledged that its calculations were incomplete, particularly with regard to ransomware, a particularly destructive breed of software used by hackers to extort organizations into making ransom payments in return for their data.
While the complaints gathered by the FBI came from around the world, the overwhelming majority were filed in the U.S.