The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has revealed that about 791,790 United States citizens fell victim to the activities of cyber criminals leading to the total loss of $4.1 billion.
This was contained in FBI’s Internet Crime Report 2020.
The investigative outfit said that in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic and the social distancing guidelines that followed it increased citizen’s dependence on technology.
It stated that cyber criminals discovered this and leveraged on it to defraud their victims.
“In 2020, while the American public was focused on protecting our families from a global pandemic and helping others in need, cyber criminals took advantage of an opportunity to profit from our dependence on technology to go on an Internet crime spree,” the report stated.
It listed the type of internet crimes as phishing, spoofing, extortion, among others.
“These criminals used phishing, spoofing, extortion, and various types of Internet-enabled fraud to target the most vulnerable in our society – medical workers searching for personal protective equipment, families looking for information about stimulus checks to help pay bills, and many others,” it stated.
FBI added that through the Recovery Asset Team, it “ worked with its partners to successfully freeze approximately $380 million of the $462 million in reported losses in 2020, representing a success rate of nearly 82%.”
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The report stated that from 2016 to 2020 , 2,211,396 Americans have complained about been defrauded online.
Those five years of criminal activities resulted in about $13.3 billion total losses.
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