Where The Money Is: $860 Billion, and the Financial Realities of Modern Fraud
From retailers and factories to military veterans and small towns, a wide array of victims are losing staggering amounts to fraud attacks. This Week in Fraud Trends.
It’s a new year, a new decade, and people have their minds on their money and their money on their minds. At DataVisor, we’re no different, and this week, we’re looking at some big financial numbers cropping up in the press.
Before we get into that, however, we’ll lead off with a new year-specific public service announcement, brought to us by USA Today:
“The new year is giving scammers an easy way to forge documents, but you can protect yourself with an easy New Year’s resolution: Stop abbreviating the year.”
And with that, let’s look at some fraud numbers! How about we get started with 190 million euros?
“EssilorLuxottica, the newly merged Italian-French eyewear conglomerate, said it was the target of a 190 million euro ($213 million) fraud at a factory in Thailand as a power struggle roils its headquarters.”
Next up? How about $6 billion … and the possibility of a great deal more!
“Augustine Fou, an independent researcher who has spent more than 20 years in the field, believes the scale of the fraud is ‘many times’ the industry’s official line that fake clicks cost companies around $6bn a year.”
This next number might be quite a bit smaller, but given the context, it’s pretty significant all the same:
“Erie officials announced the town was recently a victim of financial fraud after sending just over $1.01 million to an unknown person claiming to be a construction company the town had hired to build Erie Parkway bridge.”
Now, just over $1 million might not sound like much when compared to $6 billion, but given that Erie, Colorado’s population is estimated to be in the 25k range, you’re talking about $40 stolen from every single person in the town!
Modern-day fraudsters have a nasty habit of being very targeted with their attacks, and small Colorado towns aren’t the only victims. This brings us to our next number: $405 million.
“In terms of who sustained the most substantial losses, active-duty personnel and veterans of the U.S. Army were hardest hit, conned nearly 577,000 times since 2012 to the tune of over $142 million.”
We’ve saved one of the biggest numbers for last … $12 billion!
“With annual sales projected to reach over $630 billion going into 2020, online retailers are a high priority target for hackers, so much so that annual losses attributed to website attacks are estimated at $12 billion.”
Here’s the biggest number from the week: $860 billion. As reported by Dark Reading, that’s how lucrative illegal marketplaces are, and it’s revelations like that, that make some of the other numbers in this post not so surprising:
“Total cybercrime revenues are around $1.5 trillion. And the cybercriminals earning the most are making as much as $2 million a year.”
Digital crime may pay, but it’s wrong, and it must be stopped. It will be stopped. At DataVisor, that’s our mission.
In case you missed our recent Year-in-Review post, we encourage you to read it — it’s a 12-month celebration of victories against the fraudsters!
As to what comes next?
Well, as we said, it’s a new year, and a new decade, and DataVisor CEO and Co-Founder Yinglian Xie was recently asked to offer some predictions as to what to expect in 2020. She joins 29 payments executives from companies such as ACI, MasterCard, Visa, and more in a new Time Capsule report from PYMNTS that highlights topics like device-enabled commerce, real-time payments, and enhanced security.
And with that, we wish you a safe and prosperous 2020!
See you next week for another edition of This Week in Fraud Trends! Until then, it’s our …
Tweet of the Week!
This week’s honor goes to Berci Meskó, MD, PhD, for highlighting the augmentative power of AI as it pertains to an amazing application of this transformative technology. It’s not a fraud story by any means, but it IS a story about how AI can produce meaningful change in the modern world—a topic dear to our hearts at DataVisor!
