An FBI unit recovered $300 million of $3.5 billion in reported cybercrime losses last year

A special unit inside the FBI helped victims of cybercrime recover $300 million of the roughly $3.5 billion in reported losses in 2019, according to a top bureau official. Tonya Ugoretz, a deputy assistant director in the cyber division at the FBI, said Monday the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) responded to more than 467,000 complaints in 2019, up from 351,937 complaints in 2018. Each one of the nearly 500,000 complaints submitted to the FBI was analyzed by an individual human who then determines whether to begin an investigation and, in some cases, try to recover stolen funds, Ugoretz said. The FBI first quantified the figures from last year in its annual IC3 report, published earlier this month. The same report included details about how reported losses from ransomware attacks doubled in the past year to $8.9 million, though the true figure likely is much higher, and that attacks increasingly […]

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