FBI: U.S. lost record $12.5B to online crime in 2023

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fbi-us-lost-record-125-billion-to-online-crime-in-2023/

by mikece • 2 years ago

41 22 2 years ago

bleepingcomputer.com

blackhawkC17• 2 years ago

This figure seems relatively low as a percentage of GDP.

yellow_postit• 2 years ago

Crypto delivering on its mission of ease of access and transfer across borders

StarterPro• 2 years ago

I'm in the wrong business

COGlory• 2 years ago

I've read that there was just a huge amount of fraud (hundreds of billions) in the payroll protection scheme, and that a lot of that fraud was virtual. How is 12.5 billion possibly the record?

rileymat2• 2 years ago

It is reported losses to the FBI.

HWR_14• 2 years ago

Not all fraud committed with a computer is "online crime".

shmde• 2 years ago

Okay a big amount. Now tell me how much did Pentagon lose during its auditing ?

PopAlongKid3• 2 years ago

tech/customer support and government impersonation scams, targeting mostly the elderly, led to more than $1.3 billion in losses.

And in the U.S. at least, many of these elderly are very interested in trying to deduct these losses from their taxable income. As a skeptic, I think it is too tempting to claim "I was scammed out of $200K in digital assets" (which may have been purchased in the first place as part of the alleged scam) in order to actually hide those assets from family and/or the government.

wenebego• 2 years ago

This seems like victim blaming.

PopAlongKid3• 2 years ago

That would only apply if every single person who claimed they were a victim, was in fact a victim. I'm speculating that is not the case, because there are strong financial incentives to lie.

alexambarch• 2 years ago

Oh boy I sure hope I receive my grandmother's Monero cold wallet in her will!

berner• 2 years ago

It's an interesting idea, but I doubt that many are going through with reporting a fake digital scam loss to the FBI without a lot of them getting caught in basic blunders, especially when the FBI goes to trace and recover the funds..

Our perception of losses based on lying in circumstances where there are no consequences may be higher.

mobilemidget• 2 years ago

I was just reading the dating app crypto scamming market is $75B worldwide.

kramerger• 2 years ago

What is that?

Do you mean scams that start on tinder? Pig butchering?

which2• 2 years ago

Not that the number isn't absurdly large, but there are a few reasons to think that estimate is about an order of magnitude too high.

The first of which is that Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar all together only have a GDP of about $100 billion. 90% of these scams are run from that region of the world. The second is that these sorts of analyses end up unknowingly including the addresses of so-called "P2P exchangers" i.e. unlicensed but not necessarily entirely black market currency exchanges such as hawaladars. If one of the fraudsters converts their Tether to another currency with one of these exchangers, that address will be labelled as "fraud" even if all of the exchangers other customers are legitimate (informal money transfer systems are used for remittances in a lot of the world). The fact that unofficial exchangers often have business relationships with each other also even further complicates analyses that look solely at on-chain data. Lastly, no existing analysis, including by companies like Chainalysis, even comes close to $75 billion.

manquer2• 2 years ago

Keep in mind 75B is over 4 years the GDP numbers cited is for a single year .

The fact it is such a large portion of the GDP is one reason why these scam compounds are able to operate without getting shutdown , there is indirect support from government officials.

John Oliver mentioned it is as much as 50% of the GDP in Cambodia in a recent segment.

Romance scams are not new, but this has grown so quickly because of COVID , all these countries had sudden loss of tourism revenue, the gangs exploited desperate people to run these scams .

A vast majority of people scammed like this do not report to the authorities. They are too embarrassed to be scammed this way.

If victims don’t report then nothing gets labeled as fraud.

Also remember these scammers run exchange apps (fake-ish ones ) to fool people in losing more money by showing their investments going up and try to make you pay more as “tax” when you finally try to withdraw and so on .

The scam is crypto based, but the transactions don’t necessarily always happen in crypto at all, so analysis of chain alone is not sufficient to know the scale .

tiahura• 2 years ago

Way low. Only a small fraction gets reported. My elderly terminally-ill mom lost a couple hundred thousand and we never reported it. I assume most don't.

I really don't understand why more political pressure isn't put on backbone operators to blacklist more.

morbicer• 2 years ago

Meanwhile wage theft in US is $50 billion and FBI couldn't care less

https://www.epi.org/press/wage-theft-costs-american-workers-...

FBI: U.S. lost record $12.5B to online crime in 2023

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