FBI: The Most Perpetrated Cybercrime Is Not What You Think

Time for another dive into the giant set of stats provided by the FBI's  Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) annual report from 2018 (the latest).

This time, the folks at Hotspot Shield/Pango took a look at the info state by state to see which type of cybercrime hurts most in your area. More than 50 percent of the 50 states pegged nondelivery or nonpayment for goods or services as the number-one problem (see the chart above). Extortion is bad for about 20 percent—that's 10 states plus the District of Columbia. (Imagine that, extortion in DC.)

It turns out the high-profile crimes we read about a lot, such as phishing scams and ransomware are way down on the list. 

Nonpayment/nondelivery was not where the most money was lost, however. Investment scams were up with loss per victim average of around $2.4 million. That's a total of $252.9 million for the year; but for the biggest loss overall, look to business email compromise (BEC) and email account compromise (EAC), that special form of fraud where a business or individual is fooled into not only falling for the scam but also sending money to the scammer. That cost around $1.3 billion total for the year 2018.  Total cybercrime loss in 2018: $2.7 billion.

Back to the states: North Carolina ($13K per victim on average) and Minnesota ($10.3K per victim) were hit worst. The states with the least cybercrime were Alaska and Maine.

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Take the victim's age into consideration, and it's clear that the elderly are the hardest-hit victims. They account for the most monetary loss per victim ($10,457) and the most loss total for the year ($649.2 million), and were the most victimized in the most states.

For more on the types of scam that befell some of those people and other age groups, as well as other details from the FBI's stats, read the full report at HotspotShield.com.