The number of reported identity theft cases doubled in the last year after cybercriminals took advantage of people filling to receive government benefits.
The Federal Trade Commission reported during their “Identity Theft Awareness Week” that they received over 1.4 million reports of identity theft during 2020.
“Repeatedly, identity thieves targeted government funds earmarked to help people hard hit financially by the pandemic,”
Seena Gressin, an attorney with the Division of Consumer and Business Education at the FTC.
Last year, the U.S. government expanded unemployment benefits to people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Cybercriminals saw this as the perfect opportunity to file unemployment claims with other people’s personal information. There were almost 400,000 government benefits fraud reports in 2020, compared to 13,000 in 2019.
On another note, cybercriminals also targeted people trying to collect funds from government-sponsored small-business loan programs. The number of reported cases grew to almost 100,000 in 2020.
Bad actors also practiced these types of attacks to target stimulus checks paid out to the taxpayers.
Check the source.
Read More
- Massive $59M Facebook Phishing Campaign Steals Nearly 400M CredentialsThreat actors have managed to net a staggering $59 million and steal hundreds of millions of credentials in a […]
- Human Error is a Top Security Risk in 2022, New Report ShowsA new report from Verizon warns about the human error as being one of the most frequent causes of […]
- Paying The Ransom – An Open Invitation For A Second Attack, 2022 Report WarnsWhether the unlucky victim of a ransomware attack ends up paying the ransom or not, they are still susceptible […]
- FBI: Business Email Compromise – a $43B ScamA new FBI report warns of a staggering spike in hacking activities using the Business Email Compromise technique (BEC), […]
- NVIDIA Confirms Employee Credentials And Proprietary Data Stolen During CyberattackNVIDIA confirmed the Lapsus$ cyberattack and the data leak that followed, saying it first became aware of the security […]
Attribution:
Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash