By Abiola Olawale
The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has revealed Nigeria ranks as the 16th worst affected country by internet crime in 2020 with a total of 443 fraud complaints lodged from Nigeria.
This was contained in the 2020 Report of the Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) — a U.S intelligence agency, published on the official website of FBI, on Wednesday.
The report also indicated that the United Kingdom ranked first with 216, 633 complaints, followed by Canada with 5,399 complaints.
Apart from Nigeria, South Africa was also listed among the ‘worst’ 20. South Africa ranked sixth with 1,754 complaints.
The report also revealed that the top three internet crimes reported in 2020 are, phishing scams, non-payment/non-delivery scams and exhortion.
Additionally, the IC3 received 791, 790 complaints, with reported losses estimated at about $4.2 billion.
The IC3 which was established in May 2000, to receive complaints of Internet crime, has now recorded a total of 5,679,259, since its inception.
The statement partly reads, “IC3 received a record number of complaints from the American public in 2020: 791,790, with reported losses exceeding $4.1 billion. This represents a 69 per cent increase in total complaints from 2019. Business E-mail Compromise schemes continued to be the costliest: 19,369 complaints with an adjusted loss of approximately $1.8 billion. Phishing scams were also prominent: 241,342 complaints, with adjusted losses of over $54 million. The number of ransomware incidents also continues to rise, with 2,474 incidents reported in 2020,” Deputy Director of FBI, Paul Abbate, added.
The top 20 countries and their number of victims are:
- United Kingdom 216,633
- Canada 5,399
- India 2,930
- Greece 2,314
- Australia 1,807
- South Africa 1,754
- France 1,640
- Germany 1,578
- Mexico 1,164
- Belgium 1,023
- Brazil 951
- Philippines 898
- Italy 728
- Spain 618
- Netherlands 450
- Nigeria 443
- Pakistan 443
- China 442
- Colombia 418
- Hong Kong 407.
It would be recalled that in 2019, IC3 received 467, 361 complaints, with an average of 1,300 per day. The report also recorded $3.5 billion losses from the individual and business victims. However, Nigeria wasn’t part of the top 20 international victim countries of internet fraud in 2019.
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