EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) — Almost half a million Americans fell prey to internet scams last year, losing $3.5 billion in the process, the FBI reported on Tuesday.
The most frequent complaints involved fraudulent emails (phishing), payment and delivery scams and extortion. The most costly scams were associated with a business email being hijacked, romance fraud and spoofing — sending information to a phony account that mimics that of a real person or company.
These trends are documented in the 2019 Internet Crimes Report put out by IC3, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The agency says this past calendar year saw the highest number of complaints and the highest dollar losses recorded since the center was established in May 2000