The FBI has reported a record-breaking $16.6 billion in losses from online crimes in 2024.
This marks a sharp 33% rise from the previous year.
The data comes from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which logged over 850,000 complaints last year. Among them, more than 256,000 cases involved actual financial loss, with an average of nearly $19,400 lost per victim.
Older adults were the most affected group, especially people over 60, who filed around 147,000 complaints. They alone lost close to $4.8 billion, according to the report. The FBI also noted that scams involving fraud made up most of the losses, while ransomware remained one of the biggest threats. Ransomware attacks, which lock up a victim’s data until a payment is made, increased by 9% in 2023.
The IC3 has now received over 9 million reports since it started, and cybercrime complaints are rising sharply every year. What started as a few thousand reports per month has grown into over 2,000 complaints every single day. However, the FBI warns that these numbers may be much lower than the actual impact, as many victims never report cybercrimes.
The report also highlights that ransomware losses only include ransom payments, not other costs like business downtime, lost data, or repair services. In some cases, organizations don’t even report how much they lost, which lowers the official figures.
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The FBI also issued a warning that scammers are now pretending to be IC3 agents, offering fake help to people who have already lost money.
