Americans lost $10.3 billion to internet scams in 2022, FBI says

[Fla Dem]

Americans lost $10.3 billion to internet scams in 2022, FBI says

The revelation was part of an annual report produced by the FBI.

ByLuke Barr
March 13, 2023, 4:27 PM

Americans lost $10.3 billion to a wide variety of internet scams last year, according to an FBI report released this month. The losses were the highest in five years, according to the annual report from the FBI. The bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) lodged more than 2,000 complaints per day.

The most highly reported crimes were phishing expeditions, with 300,497 victims reporting over $52 million in losses in 2022, according to the bureau. Phishing, defined as "the use of unsolicited email, text messages, and telephone calls purportedly from a legitimate company requesting personal, financial, and/or login credentials," is frequently successful because phishing emails will often resemble those from people victims know personally, prompting them to click on unsecured links.

Data breaches and non-payment scams were the next most common internet scams in 2022, claiming 58,859 and 51,679 victims, respectively, per the report.

Snip.......

Call center scams, which emanate from India primarily, are responsible for over $1 billion in losses to victims. "Call centers overwhelmingly target the elderly, with devastating effects," the report says. "Almost half the victims report to be over 60 (46%), and experience 69% of the losses (over $724 million)." In total, the elderly lost $3.1 billion to internet scams in 2022, the most of any age group. The FBI has a 73% success rate in getting victims their funds back, according to the report.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/americans-lost-103-billion-internet-scams-2022-fbi/story?id=97832789

ABC News

[Tetrachloride]

1. Some of those were allowed to happen

[70sEraVet]

2. Hardly surprising that the elderly (I'm in that catagory myself) are especially targetted,

but this line caught me by surprise; "The FBI has a 73% success rate in getting victims their funds back...".

I had no idea. Are the people running these call centers being sent to prison, as well?
Biden could get a lot of public support from seniors by making a show of clamping down on these scams!

[slightlv]

3. Hubby, who is 4 years older than me,

refuses to give up our landline. I see it as a single point of failure in this household. All that ever comes across it is scams and spams. Why in the world should we pay for that? I know it's because he really doesn't like his cell phone... can't keep track of it, etc... ad infinitum. But geesh! It's so frustrating. They start early and go late. And they're all bots.

More than once I've come in the family room in the middle of him on the phone, only to tell him to hang up "NOW!" and turn off your computer. He's finally begun handing me the phone when he's not sure if the call is "real" or not. I told him if he's unsure, just hang up. I've got everything I can blocked from his systems, and locked down good with security software *I* have used for years and trust.

Having said all that, they're getting so smart, they *almost* caught me on one. I did finally have the smarts to say, I'm hanging up now and calling Spectrum to check this stuff out. I think THEY hung up before I did! (LOL)

And I hate to admit it, but the last call I answered was from some guy called "Mike Anderson" who had an Indian/Pakistani accent. I called him on it and hung up.

With so many companies outsourcing customer service to legitimate call centers in India, etc., it looks to me like this kind of thing would be something they would also want to stamp out. (shrug)

[republianmushroom]

4. They are always looking for that fast easy dollar.

Oh well, one is born every minute.