As I shared in my post, “Soapbox,” the FBI has released the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2019 Internet Crime Report. While my “Soapbox” post was focused on Tech Support Fraud, I think it’s important to share some of the other information found in this compte ren·du. For the record, I’m not passing this information along to scare you; I’m doing so to make you aware and not fall victim to Social Engineering scams on the Internet.

Let’s look at some of the IC3’s statistics:

I’ve highlighted the group with the largest number of victims and the highest total dollar loss. A great majority of my customers fall in this category thus my frequent posts about Social Engineering.

In the map above, you can see that California had the highest loss when it comes to money scammed on the Internet. Texas, Florida and Ohio aren’t far behind.

My final share for this post shows the victim count by the type of Internet crime. Number one on the list is Phishing/Vishing/Smishing/Pharming. The first two types of scams are primarily achieved via emails while smishing comes through text messages and pharming happens through web page re-directs. More on these two in our next post.

By the way, if you’re curious and would like to read the full 2019 Internet Crime Report, just click this button: