US lost record $16.6 billion to cybercrime in 2024

The FBI says cybercriminals have stolen a record $16,6 billion in 2024, marking an increase in losses of over 33% compared to the previous year.

According to the bureau’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report, IC3 recorded 859,532 complaints last year (256,256 with actual loss), amounting to an average loss of $19,372.

The most impacted group is older Americans, especially people over 60, who filed 147,127 complaints linked to approximately $4.8 billion in losses.

“Last year saw a new record for losses reported to IC3, totaling a staggering $16.6 billion. Fraud represented the bulk of reported losses in 2024, and ransomware was again the most pervasive threat to critical infrastructure, with complaints rising 9% from 2023,” said B. Chad Yarbrough, the FBI’s Operations Director for Criminal and Cyber.

“Since its founding, IC3 has received over 9 million complaints of malicious activity. During its infancy, IC3 received roughly 2,000 complaints every month. For the past five years, IC3 has averaged more than 2,000 complaints every day.”

Over the past five years, IC3 received 4.2 million complaints linked to $50.5 billion in losses, with an average of 836,000 complaints recorded yearly.

However, it’s important to note that all figures mentioned in IC3’s report are based on known online crime cases discovered by law enforcement or reported by victims directly.

As such, they represent only a fraction of the actual losses caused by cybercrime each year in the United States and worldwide, as many incidents will go undetected or are never reported to the authorities.

For instance, when estimating the impact of ransomware attacks, the estimated losses only include reported ransom payments (a small part of what companies pay yearly to recover their data and restore systems after such incidents).

“Regarding ransomware adjusted losses, this number does not include estimates of lost business, time, wages, files, or equipment, or any third-party remediation services acquired by an entity,” the IC3 report warns.

“In some cases, entities do not report any loss amount to FBI, thereby creating an artificially low overall ransomware loss rate. Lastly, the number only represents what entities report to FBI via IC3 and does not account for the entity directly reporting to FBI field offices/agents.”

IC3’s 2023 Internet Crime Report follows a Friday public service announcement warning that some scammers are also impersonating IC3 employees and offering to “help” fraud victims recover money lost to other scammers.