Cyber-enabled crimes defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), part of the FBI, in an annual report. Americans who submitted complaints involving cryptocurrency reported the highest losses, with 181,565 complaints totalling more than $11 billion.
Recent trends include what the FBI terms a serious rise in cybercrimes targeting minors (17 or younger), driven by sextortion, cyberbullying, and online grooming. Scammers are creating fake profiles and scripts produced by AI chat generators to make speech more believable; hence grandparent scams, or โdistressโ scams, in which voice cloning is used to mimic the sound of a loved one in distress. The age group making the most complaints and reporting the most loss is the over-60s.
Tech
As for tech, the report notes that artificial intelligence (AI) is a tool which can be used for legitimate, helpful purposes or for criminal motives. AI ‘enables the creation of convincing synthetic content, such as social media profiles and personalized conversations, often in mass quantities’. The report adds: “AI-enabled synthetic content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make, which allows criminal actors to potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against individuals, businesses, and financial institutions.”
In a foreword to the document, Jose Perez, operations director for criminal and cyber branch at the FBI, said: “It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint, and electronic interactions. Cyber threats and cyber-enabled crime will continue to evolve as the world embraces emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.”
Numbers of complaints to the IC3 and losses to cyber crimes have risen steadily since the IC3 began in 2001.
Comment
Dr Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO of BlackCloak, is a former US federal Department of Homeland Security official. He said: โThe IC3 report alerts us to a pervasive reality that we canโt afford to ignore: highly motivated threat actors know where the gaps in security exist for enterprises and family offices and are actively exploiting them at an accelerated rate. The rise of AI-enabled cybercrime and scams, deepfake impersonations, phishing and ransomware attacks, and identity theft demonstrates the consequences of an ever-growing digital risk environment.”
For the 66-page report visit https://www.ic3.gov/.
Visitย ic3.gov.
