It is already known that COVID-19–related scams witnessed a major boom last year. Lately, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has provided some important data on these scams.
The scoop
The FBI’s IC3 has logged one million complaints against online scams in the last 14 months. This brought the total number of complaints logged with the IC3 to six million. While these numbers point to the fact that people are more aware and thus, are logging their complaints, they also signify that a greater number of people are being impacted by online scams.
Internet Crime Report 2020
This report has been published by the FBI to provide data about various cybercrime, with mitigation measures. Some key highlights on online scams are:
- The top three crimes include phishing scams, extortion, and non-payment/non-delivery scams.
- BEC scams proved to be the costliest with 19,369 complaints logged. The adjusted loss was nearly $1.8 billion.
- In addition to this, people over the age of 60 are likely to encounter a myriad of scams, including investment fraud schemes, romance scams, grandparent scams, tech support scams, advance fee schemes, TV scams, and lottery scams, among others.
Some latest scams
While it is important to know the statistics and where to lodge complaints against scams, it is imperative that we also take a glance at the recent scams that victimized lots of people.
- Since October 2020, bitcoin scams have surged. Nearly 7,000 people have reported losing more than $80 million to these scams.
- Recently, there have been meal kit scams in which scammers masquerade as renowned meal kit delivery companies.
- This is the time of the year when threat actors start sending out sextortion emails. The scammers attempt to extort the targets by threatening to expose them.
The bottom line
Since 2020, scams have emerged as the next big threat. Scammers are finding new lures and improving old ones to claim as many victims as possible. These scams are getting increasingly difficult to spot with the scammers regularly coming up with new tactics. Thus, the general rule anyone should follow is that if you’re not sure of something being a scam, you should assume that it is one.
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