The FBI received more than 800,000 cybercrime-related complaints in 2022, with losses totaling more than $10 billion, the agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) revealed in its latest report.
IC3’s Internet Crime Report 2022 shows that while the number of complaints was lower compared to 2021, losses increased from $6.9 billion to $10.3 billion. In the last five years, the agency received a total of 3.26 million complaints for $27.6 billion in losses.
The top five types of cybercrime in 2022 were phishing (300,000 reports), personal data breach (58,000 reports), non-payment/non-delivery scams (51,000), extortion (39,000), and tech support scams (32,000) .
More than 21,000 complaints were related to business email compromise (BEC) attacks, with losses of $2.7 billion.
IC3’s Asset Recovery Team (RAT) has been successful in helping many victims of BEC attacks to recover their funds. The agency said it has had a 73% success rate to date, with $433 million frozen out of $590 million total reported losses.
In 2022, investment scams surpassed BEC in terms of losses, with $3.31 billion reported; there was an increase of 127% compared to 2021. A significant portion of the total was attributed to cryptocurrency investment fraud, which increased from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion in 2022.
In terms of ransomware attacks, the FBI received more than 2,300 reports last year, with adjusted losses exceeding $34 million. More than 800 of these complaints came from organizations in 14 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors. The most targeted, with more than 100 incidents each, were the healthcare, critical manufacturing, government facilities and IT sectors.
The most commonly seen ransomware operations targeting critical infrastructure were LockBit, BlackCat, and Hive. Hive was recently shut down by the police.
Call center fraud, which includes tech support and government impersonation scams, has claimed 44,000 victims, with losses exceeding $1 million, according to FBI data.
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