The 2018 Internet Crime Report is out: a first glance

The The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2018 Internet Crime Report has been released. The report includes information from 351,936 complaints of suspected Internet crime, with reported losses in excess of $2.7 billion.

Here’s a spoiler alert, as I haven’t had time to read the entire report yet. From their summary:

This past year, the most prevalent crime types reported by victims were Non-Payment/Non-Delivery, Extortion, and Personal Data Breach.

The top three crime types with the highest reported loss were BEC, Confidence/Romance fraud, and Non-Payment/Non-Delivery.

I was a bit surprised that extortion ranked second most prevalent type of crime, although with all the “pay me because I have a tape of you masturbating etc” attempts last year, I am not totally surprised. In fact, the FBI reports that in 2018, IC3 received 51,146 extortion-related complaints with adjusted losses of over $83 million, which represents a 242% increase in extortion-related complaints from 2017.

From my quick skim of some of their data, it appears that payments made in ransomware cases are not included in the loss data for extortion-related cases. Ransoms paid in ransomware cases appear to be a separate category. What was a bit of a surprise is that there were only 1,493 ransomware incidents reported to IC3, but as they note, not everything gets reported to IC3 and some or even many cases may just be reported directly to FBI field offices or agents.

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