Online criminals successfully defrauded billions of dollars from people during 2021, as internet-related crimes became more commonplace than ever before.
To that end, people working from home, especially those who conducted their meetings virtually, were specifically focused on by malicious threat actors. The IC3 said this led to fresh Business Email Compromise and Email Account Compromise schemes becoming more prevalent, as an attempt was made to “exploit this reliance on virtual meetings to instruct victims to send fraudulent wire transfers.” The report explained how exactly this specific method extracted nearly $2.
The most popular cyber crimes criminals used to target unsuspecting victims included phishing scams, non-payment/non-delivery scams, and personal data breaches. Furthermore, among the methods that saw individuals lose the most money were business email compromise scams and investment fraud.Notably, scams that were previously more widespread failed to even remotely approach some of the figures listed above. Case in point: Malware, scareware, and viruses only managed to steal $5.