Social Media, Crypto-Currency Internet Scams Increased in 2014, FBI's IC3 Says

$800.5 million, it said Friday. Men and women were targeted almost equally. Those aged 40-59 were the most targeted age group, followed by 20-39-year-olds. The U.S. was the No. 1 targeted country, followed by Canada and the U.K. California had the most victim complaints followed by Florida and Texas. The report found 12 percent of all complaints submitted in 2014 had a social media aspect. “In most cases, victim’s personal information was exploited through compromised accounts or social engineering,” said IC3. Social media scams included: doxing, publicly releasing a person’s identifying information about themselves, family and friends; click-jacking, concealing hyperlinks beneath legitimate clickable content that causes a user to unknowingly download malware or send personal information to a website; and pharming, redirecting users from legitimate websites to fraudulent ones to extract confidential data, the report said. The second popular trend IC3 found in 2014 was related to vulnerabilities of the digital currency systems. Criminals bilked millions of dollars from those who use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Peercoin, the report said. Other frequently reported Internet crimes in 2014 included auto fraud, government impersonation email scams, intimidation and extortion scams, real estate fraud, confidence fraud and romance scams, and business email compromises, it said.