The 2022 Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Annual Internet Crime Report published today to the IC3 website https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2022_IC3Report.pdf.
The individual State accompanied reports are available on the link https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2022State/StateReport.aspx. Select ‘Texas’ at the top and the information for the selected state will auto populate. Click on the icon to the left of each table to see results in a bar graph.
In 2022, the IC3 received a total of 800,944 complaints, with losses exceeding $10.3 billion. Phishing schemes were the number one crime type with 300,497 complaints. For the first time, investment schemes reported the highest losses to victims, totaling over $3.3 billion.
In 2022, the IC3 received 88,262 complaints from victims over the age of 60 with losses in excess of $3.1 billion. As a result of the significant impact of scams targeting the elderly, IC3 is planning to release its third annual report focusing entirely on Elder Fraud within the next few weeks.
The 2022 threat overviews include:
- BEC complaints ranked the second largest dollar losses reported to IC3 at over $2.7 billion.
- Crypto-investment scams saw unprecedented increases in the number of victims and the dollar losses to investors. In 2022, investment scam losses were the most (common or dollar amount) scheme reported to the IC3. Investment fraud complaints increased from $1.45 billion in 2021 to $3.31 billion in 2022. Within those complaints, cryptocurrency investment fraud rose from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion in 2022.
- Ransomware losses were more than $34.3 million. The IC3 received 870 complaints that indicated organizations belonging to a critical infrastructure sector were victims of a ransomware attack. Of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors, IC3 reporting indicated 14 sectors had at least 1 member that fell victim to a ransomware attack in 2022. The three top ransomware variants reported to the IC3 that victimized a member of a critical infrastructure sector were Lock bit, ALPHV/Blackcoats, and Hive.
- Illegal call centers defraud thousands of victims each year. Two categories of fraud reported to the IC3, Tech/Customer Support and Government Impersonation, are responsible for over $1 billion in losses to victims. Almost half the victims report to be over 60 (46%), and experience 69% of the losses (over $724 million).
