![]() ![]() ![]() Last year, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 467,361 complaints, with reported losses exceeding $3.5 billion.Īnd the problem has only festered since the start of the coronavirus, when millions of people across the world retreated under social distancing rules and turned to the internet for almost all communication. According to Gallup, one in four Americans is a victim of cybercrime each year, from relationship scams to fake IT support to Ponzi schemes to phishing. Scamming has long been a fundamental element of the internet. “The money that would have been spent on Main Street-it’s now China or somewhere else.” “We’re all suffering from that sucking sound of hundreds of billions of dollars leaving our economy,” Kristin Judge, the CEO and president of the Cybercrime Support Network, says. Experts worry that if unchecked, American wallets will be bled to death by a thousand cuts-and a digital ecosystem that serves as crucial infrastructure for small businesses could crumble under a torrent of spam and a general lack of trust. Meanwhile, the volume of shady fraudulent activity is accelerating over the holiday season, as people search for affordable gifts for their loved ones. The global nature of these scams, combined with the relatively low value of each individual con, means that they have largely escaped the scrutiny of law enforcement. And the spoils of one of the largest known shopping scam networks may be benefiting a major Chinese company: the publicly traded TIZA Information Industry Corporation INC., whose 2019 revenue was $549 million. Many of them appear to be part of systematic, well-oiled global operations, designed to take advantage of the lack of oversight on social media marketplaces and the influx of novice online shoppers brought by pandemic quarantines, and the shutdown of brick-and-mortar stores. And these scams are not the work of individual small-time crooks. ![]()
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