Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds.Most COVID-19 phishing scams revolved around a handful of themes related to the pandemic and its economic impact on businesses and citizens: Like the BEC example above, cybercriminals leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic in a large number of attacks. Like BEC, phishing attacks have reached new levels of sophistication, with social engineering being at the heart of most phishing attacks. Unlike BEC, phishing costs decreased slightly, with $54 million in losses in 2020, down from $57 million in 2019. According to IC3, 241,342 victims reported phishing to the FBI in 2020, compared 114,702 victims in 2019.

The oldest trick in the book made a big comeback in 2020. They were just one of tens of thousands of businesses and citizens who fell victim to COVID-19 scams in 2020. The victim company believed they were investing in ventilators. The FBI highlighted a BEC case from Chicago in which a business specializing in hand sanitizer wired nearly $1 million to hackers. Cybercriminals have branched out from standard CEO fraud involving wire transfer requests to scams targeting the real estate industry, vendor and lawyer impersonation, gift card fraud, and personal email compromise. As the FBI notes, attacks have become more sophisticated in the last few years, with significant advancements in social engineering tactics. BEC, or spear phishing, cost US businesses more than $1.8 billion in 2020, up from $1.7 billion in 2019.īEC affects businesses of all sizes and in all industries. Although the number of victims decreased from the previous year, the costs increased. The FBI received 19,369 reports of business email compromise (BEC) in the US in 2020. Business email compromise tops list of costliest cybercrimes Below are the most standout cybercrime statistics of the year. According to the FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report (IC3), phishing claimed the most victims, with non-payment/non-delivery, extortion, personal data breaches, and identity theft rounding out the top five cybercrime types of 2020. Phishing attacks doubled, COVID scams raged, and ransomware wreaked havoc in 2020.

Current phishing scams 2019