About seven years, The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has examined reports received by US law enforcement agencies about all different types of digital crimes, and they have consistently found that business email compromise (BEC) scam resulting in the highest total losses per year. But in its latest Internet Crime ReportReleased today for incidents in 2022, “investment” scams have surpassed all other scams to become the biggest digital threat, with a loss of 3.3 billion dollars last year.
IC3 reported that BEC—in which attackers trick businesses into making fake payments or intercepting legitimate payments—caused nearly $2.4 billion in losses. in 2021 and $2.7 billion by 2022. In other words, those attacks are still a significant and growing threat. However, investment scams, especially those that claim to offer a crypto investment avenue, have exploded over the past 18 months. They were especially motivated by the so-called Scam “slaughter pork”in which attackers cold-contact a target via text messaging or other messaging platforms, initiate a conversation to build trust, and then say they can help the individual reach a deal. profitable investment agreement.
Total investment fraud losses were $3.31 billion in 2022 compared with $1.45 billion in 2021, an increase of 127 percent. And the FBI notes that crypto investment scams in particular caused $2.57 billion in losses in 2022, up from $907 million in 2021—an increase of 183%.
In 2021, IC3 tracked pig-slaughtering attacks by that name and classified them as “romantic scams” rather than crypto scams, resulting in $429 million in losses related to the scams. slaughtered pigs that year. In the new report, IC3 doesn’t mention the phrase “pork dissection” but does say in the addendum that “a single complaint can have multiple types of crime”.
The figures appear to reflect IC3’s efforts to rapidly refine its understanding of how these scams work in light of the sudden increase in pig slaughter activity. But it’s hard to get a clear picture as it depends on how you categorize different types of scams. For example, romance scams (also known as “trust fraud”) fell from 24,299 claims in the 2021 report to 19,021 in 2022. Affiliate losses fell from 956 million dollars to $736 million. But the US Federal Trade Commission speak Last month, they received reports of nearly 70,000 scams in 2022 and $1.3 billion in losses.
The FBI wrote in its Internet Crime Report 2022: “Cryptocurrency investment scams have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of victims and dollar amount of damages to this investor. “Many victims have taken on huge debt to cover losses from these fraudulent investments.”
Researchers who have tracked pig slaughter say the trend is unmistakable. For example, in a recent study by security firm Sophos, senior threat researcher Sean Gallagher track a crime campaign initially seems to have accumulated around $500,000 in stolen crypto in a month. However, after further investigation and identifying more wallets linked to the attackers, Gallagher concluded that the gang stole about 3 million dollars in five months.
