Cybercrime losses soar to $16.6 billion in 2024, crypto dominates

Cybercrime losses reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) exceeded $16.6 billion last year. Those over the age of 60 suffered the most devastating harm.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received almost 860,000 complaints in 2024. The figure was lower compared to the previous year, despite an upward trend over the five years as a whole.

However, the total losses of $16.6 billion marked a 33% increase from 2023, when cybercriminals raked in $12.5 billion.

The age group of over 60 years old filed the most complaints (147,000), and suffered the largest losses among all age groups of $4.8 billion.

On average, elderly people lose $32,600 per complaint, compared to an average of $19,300 per complaint for all age groups.

“These rising losses are even more concerning because last year, the FBI took significant actions to make it harder, and more costly, for malicious actors to succeed. We dealt a serious blow to LockBit, one of the world’s most active ransomware groups,” said B. Chad Yarbrough, Operations Director for Criminal and Cyber at the FBI.

“We disbanded fraud and laundering syndicates, shut down scam call centers, shuttered illicit marketplaces, dissolved nefarious ‘botnets,’ and put hundreds of other actors behind bars.”

Most of the reported cybercrimes were phishing and spoofing (193,000), followed by extortion (86,000), personal data breach (65,000), non-payment or non-delivery schemes (50,000), investment (48,000), and other scams.

Investment scams were by far the most costly cybercrime type, netting cybercriminals $6.56 billion.

In total, $9.3 billion of losses last year had a cryptocurrency descriptor, which the FBI uses to relate to the medium or tool hackers used to facilitate the crime.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams were the second most costly cybercrime category, resulting in over $2.9 billion in losses from just 21,489 complaints. One case netted criminals an average of $135,000.

While ransomware gets a lot of attention, there were only 3,156 reported cases, and the losses were estimated to be $12.5 million, hundreds of times less than those from tech support scams, personal data breaches, romance scams, or government impersonation scams.

However, some ransomware victims do not report losses, and the figure doesn’t include lost business, time, wages, files, equipment, or any remediation services, the FBI explains.

The FBI said it received more than 4,800 complaints from organizations in the critical infrastructure sector, most of them related to ransomware and data breaches.

The IC3 encourages victims to always report cybercrimes, regardless of financial loss, to aid in tracking and combating cyber threats.