Security News

Business email compromise/email account compromise scams still have the highest financial toll on victims, but investment fraud has also lead to massive losses last year, FBI's 2021 Internet Crime Report has revealed. The?2021 Internet Crime Report is based on information from 847,376 complaints about internet-enabled crimes the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has received in 2021 from individuals and entities across the globe.

Sift released a report, detailing the increasingly sophisticated - and often automated - tactics cybercriminals leverage to commit payment fraud. Derived from a global network of over 34,000 sites and apps and a survey of over 1,000 consumers, the index reveals that the payment fraud attack rate across fintech ballooned 70% in 2021-making it the highest increase across any vertical in the network.

The continuous growth of e-commerce could be behind a surge in shipping fraud, which is now the fastest growing type of digital fraud worldwide, according to a TransUnion report. Shipping fraud - defined as when a buyer spoofs a shipping address or when a seller receives payment for goods or services, but never ships to the buyer - has quickly emerged as one of the top fraud types across a variety of industries.

Nearly one in 10 smartphone users in the UK, as many as 5.7 million people, have fallen victim to identity fraud in the last 12 months, according to a research by GBG. The report can reveal that young adults aged 18-to-24 were hardest hit with 18% becoming victims of identity fraud compared to 9% of 45-to-54-year-olds, and just 3% of consumers aged 55 and over. The report revealed that fraud is major concern across Europe - with 9% of consumers across the continent also being hit in the last 12 months.

Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. Once crooks scare or trick victims into handing over money via Zelle, they can siphon away thousands of dollars in seconds.

European merchants spent nearly €7 billion on fraud detection and prevention in 2021 alone - more than three times the value lost to fraud in the same year, CMSPI estimates. These practices are unsustainable for the continent's merchants, who are currently facing compound annual fraud growth of 1.5%. As retailers' margins are squeezed, fraud and its wider impacts are just another inflationary pressure that see merchants and good customers losing out.

Millions of Americans fall victim to identity theft and fraud each year, resulting in billions of dollars in losses. "In today's digitally connected world, cyber fraud and identity theft have become the ultimate crimes of opportunity: as quickly as vulnerabilities are detected and protected against, new ones emerge. Yet, few resources exist to help Americans, experts and the news media understand digital fraud and the latest attacks," says Emily Snell, President of Allstate Identity Protection.

The US Federal Trade Commission said today that Americans reported losses of more than $5.8 billion to fraud during last year, a massive total increase of over 70% compared to the losses reported in 2020. The FTC added a total of roughly 5.7 million consumer reports to its Consumer Sentinel Network secure online database in 2021.

Metaverse companies face 60% more attacks last year, and 5 other online fraud statistics. By its reckoning, 21% of all online traffic was fraud or cyberattack related, one in four new account registrations were fake, 80% of all login attacks were credential stuffing attempts and the travel industry was hit particularly hard, with a 12.5 time increase in attacks as people return to traveling.

Bolster published a report which shows an unprecedented level of fraud activity, spurred by the continuing growth of digital commerce, leading to an explosion of companies' external attack surfaces. Using data gathered from analyzing more than one billion sites, the 2022 State of Phishing and Online Fraud Report highlights the trends that drove digital scams in 2021.