US Lost Record $12.5 Billion To Online Crime In 2023, Says FBI (bleepingcomputer.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2023 Internet Crime Report (PDF), which recorded a 22% increase in reported losses compared to 2022, amounting to a record of $12.5 billion. The number of relevant complaints submitted to the FBI in 2023 reached 880,000, 10% higher than the previous year, with the age group topping the report being people over 60, which shows how vulnerable older adults are to cybercrime. Both figures continue a worrying trend seen by the agency since 2019, where complaints and losses rise yearly. For 2023, the types of crimes that increased were tech support scams and extortion, whereas phishing, personal data breach, and non-payment/non-delivery scams slightly waned.
We weren't ready. (Score:3, Insightful)
As a big speculative fiction fan, there are many stories of various civilizations reaching the information age in various states of economic and ethical/moral development. Those that have good economics, and poor ethical/moral standards, rarely fare well. I wonder where those writers got those ideas from?
Capitalism, as it exists in our world, is a direct opposing force to morality and ethical behavior. It incentivizes profit above all, and there is zero incentive for taking care of people who don't provide value to the owner class. In fact, there is much more incentive to punish those not of value to the owner class. We saw the beginning of the information age as a new sense of freedom, and a new ability to gain insight on other people, other cultures, other ways of thinking. The profit-seekers found it, turned it into an advertising and propaganda machine that can be utilized to increase profits, and make people hate one another. It's been so effectively used that we're now more likely to want neighbors dead over what political "team" they are on than realize that both teams are playing a game completely removed from the voting public. (This is from an American perspective.) Instead, the propaganda grows, the overall moral/ethical health of our species continues to plummet, and most cheer its demise as a detriment to true "prosperity," which has somehow been redefined as continuing to gut the middle class and down in order to feed more and more wealth to those who already have plenty.
There are too many people being neglected by our profit above all societies. And people who are feel like they're being passed by by the rest of society often turn to crime just to survive, or to try to get the tiniest bit ahead. Crime shouldn't pay, but it does, because there's no other recourse. Cyber crime is one avenue that's very, VERY tempting because of the ease of it, and it's one of the few crimes where it's still relatively difficult to catch the perpetrator.
We weren't ready for the information age as a species. We're barely past the feces throwing stage. In same ways, the information age is making us regress back into that feces throwing stage, directed by the profit above all crowd.
Re:We weren't ready. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cyber crime is one avenue that's very, VERY tempting because of the ease of it, and it's one of the few crimes where it's still relatively difficult to catch the perpetrator.
Try telling that to SBF.
The reason most scammers get away with it is that they're outside of the US borders and they stick to schemes which primarily target people who don't have the resources to go around cracking skulls in Russia/Nigeria/wherever. However, if you're a US citizen doing computer crimes, yeah, you'll eventually get caught. The FBI isn't stupid.
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Cyber crime is one avenue that's very, VERY tempting because of the ease of it, and it's one of the few crimes where it's still relatively difficult to catch the perpetrator.
Try telling that to SBF.
The reason most scammers get away with it is that they're outside of the US borders and they stick to schemes which primarily target people who don't have the resources to go around cracking skulls in Russia/Nigeria/wherever. However, if you're a US citizen doing computer crimes, yeah, you'll eventually get caught. The FBI isn't stupid.
SBF was a kid blowing money like a moron and making public spectacles of himself. The FBI would have to be blind, not stupid, to miss that amount of stupidity.
Re: We weren't ready. (Score:1)
And SBF was being protected and ignored by the FBI because he had powerful friends in government. It wasnâ(TM)t until another company did a private investigation and regular people started a run on the bank that they were forced to admit he had been scamming people.
But it has since become clear that various people in government power were aware, held their hand above his head because it benefited them. And even then, whatever punishment he gets will be way less severe than what you expect, some large e
No harm was done??? (Score:2)
Hard to believe even lawyers would stoop so low as to claim that.
"Well, yeah, it was totally mismanaged, squandered... sure. But what little was left over has been doing great! We can sell that and give everybody back their original investment (with no gain whatsoever, of course). So we're good here, right? No harm, no foul!"
That takes some brass ones to argue that.
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Can you recommend some books? Sounds interesting.
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Can you recommend some books? Sounds interesting.
To be completely fair, a lot of them are utter trash. Interesting premises with great story frameworks, then fall flat on their faces in the execution. The joys of non-big-publisher fiction.
One of my favorites that I don't think fails in the execution would be Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Children of the Sky. A Deepness in the Sky delves heavily into a specie just reaching their information age, and seeing it beginning to play out in a way that's not completely different from the
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Loved those Vinge novels. Thanks, maybe worth a re-read. I've been listening to a lot of "shovelware"-type audiobooks on Audible and have to say I've really been enjoying them. The Undying Mercenaries series is surprisingly good if you like military sci-fi, but Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson really takes you on a wild ride.
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Loved those Vinge novels. Thanks, maybe worth a re-read. I've been listening to a lot of "shovelware"-type audiobooks on Audible and have to say I've really been enjoying them. The Undying Mercenaries series is surprisingly good if you like military sci-fi, but Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson really takes you on a wild ride.
Sweet, thanks for the recommendations. I'll add them to my reading pile and see if any of them jump out at me. I'm big on pulpy sci-fi / fantasy too, so I tend to jump on anything from hard-sci-fi to full-fledged dumpstire-fire level fantasy.
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Anybody who doubts you simply has to take a look at the choice Americans will almost certainly have to make between two corrupt, senile old scumbags, one of whom will become the most powerful man in the so-called Free World.
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the most powerful man in the so-called Free World.
The evidence I have seen points to the President being pretty worthless in getting anything of value accomplished
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I heartily agree with the "of value" part of your comment.
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Anybody who doubts you simply has to take a look at the choice Americans will almost certainly have to make between two corrupt, senile old scumbags, one of whom will become the most powerful man in the so-called Free World.
Our political system has become a shell-game of Boomers trying desperately to retain all power, while decrying anyone else attempting to approach it as ill-informed. Spoiled children who will not let go of the ball until it's stripped from their cold, dead hands. If there's a world left when their finished with it.
Elon Musk effect? (Score:1)
Not quite as much (Score:1)
Fidelity cuts value of X stake, implying 72% drop since Musk paid $44 billion.
Shit that happened to me in the past year (Score:5, Informative)
The IRS threatened to arrest me if I don't forward $10,000 to their Bangalore agent.
My online girlfriend was stranded in Romania on her flight to see me.
I had to pay a credit card debt for a card I didn't have or I was going to be immediately arrested at work.
My new car's factory warranty had to get renewed.
I inadvertently purchased a MacBook Pro on Amazon and had to provide my credit card details in order to reverse the charges.
I donated to save amazon rain forest from the effects of climate change.
My computer had a virus that was detected by someone who graciously offered to clean it for me for a small fee.
By coincidence right after paying someone to clean my computer of a virus my whole hard drive was encrypted by malware and I had to pay to have it decrypted.
I won a Disney vacation, but even though I paid the $500 tax and processing fee I never obtained the tickets.
My email address won the Nigeria national lottery, but had to send a fee in order to release the funds.
I had to pay $5,000 to obtain a loan for $100,000.
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I inadvertently purchased a MacBook Pro on Amazon and had to provide my credit card details in order to reverse the charges.
I've mostly encountered this one as a Dell computer scam. My mother gets them frequently, and I have to keep reminding her that no, she should not call the scammers to cancel the order, because that's exactly how the scam works. She hasn't fallen for the scam, but she does still text me asking "Why is Dell saying I ordered an expensive computer from them?"
Roundabout (Score:2)
Wow! 0.2% of what we borrowed last year!
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The number is probably a lot higher, since most people don't realize or report when they fall for these scams .. especially when the charges are small enough. For example, they might pay $500 to have their tax evasion problem go away and never realize it was a scam. Or they might donate to some cause and never realize the money was not going towards being used to for that cause. A lot of scammers use shame as a tactic to prevent their victim from reporting it. The FTC needs to do more and apply more pressur
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Indeed. Using a figure from Germany, which should have roughly comparable damage per capita, I arrive at about 60 times higher, i.e. about $750B.
Reference: https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
Sounds a bit low (Score:4, Interesting)
Germany estimates a cost of EUR 206B (USD $225B) for 2023 due to cybercrime. That is about 16x of this FBI estimate at about 25% the population and probably a general IT security and industrial level roughly comparable to the US.
Hence scaled for population, the German estimate is about 60x higher. Something is very off.
Reference: https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
How does it compare to wage theft? (Score:1)
Is this more or less than wage theft?
Peanuts. (Score:1)
source: The Guardian [theguardian.com]
Relentless Assault (Score:2)
How do they have any idea? (Score:2)
Vulnerable older adults (Score:2)
Mostly Bob Iger. Because of all the S.O.B.s downloading his stuff with torrents.
Blame MICROS~! (Score:1)
what theft (Score:1)
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Enlighten me. Have I lost a nickle ( $0.05 ) to cyber-criminals ? Tell me how ?
Yes. Every company that raises its prices to recover from cyber crimes affects your purchasing power. Every insurance premium you pay that is higher than it used to be because of electronic fraud is affecting you. Every time your personal information is stolen it affects your privacy. Each time a financial institution is defrauded either your IRA portfolio, your investment accounts, or the economy in general could be affected and reduce the growth of your annuities.
Even if a person doesn't own a compute
Start by shutting down India scammers.... (Score:2)