If you still think we’re struggling to find solid use cases for Digital Identity, a new report from the FBI might just change your mind.
The reason: Uncle Sam has found an astonishing 92% rise in online theft, fraud, and exploitation – a figure that rose from an already unacceptably high $1.4bn in 2017 to a whopping $2.7bn in 2018.
The study – available here – is from the G-Mens’ Internet Crime Complaint Centre, or IC3, which is tasked with analysing the issue on a global basis.
IC3 got over 351,000 complaints in 2018, an average of 900 a day, and says the most frequent issues were for non-payment or no-delivery scams, extortion and personal data breaches.
So-called business email compromise (BEC) – where organisations get scammed by fake invoices – is the costliest single area, followed by romance fraud. In one BEC case mentioned in the report, a US citizen wired someone $56,179.21 for a fake home purchase – but luckily, their local FBI Recovery Asset Team was able to freeze the funds transfer, and $54,000 was safely returned.
