Top Cybercrimes in the U.S.

Cybercriminals are capitalizing on the massive amount of people who order things on the internet. According to the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, the top reported cybercrime in the U.S. was the non-payment or delivery of a good ordered over the internet. This type of cybercrime affected more than 84,000 people in 2017 alone. Trailing in a distance second are personal data breaches and phishing or pharming scams, both hovering just above and below 25,000 complaints respectively.

Many of these crimes are not well known outside of the cybercrime community. Business email compromise or email account compromise (BEC/EAC) are scams where a business email or personal email account is invaded using computer intrusion techniques. The information obtained there is used to conduct unauthorized transfers of funds.

Confidence fraud or romance fraud is when a scammer will gain the trust of a person, leading them to believe there is some strong familial or romantic bond between the two people, only to persuade them to send money or financial information over to the scammer.