Report from FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says online theft, fraud, and exploitation caused losses of $2.7B globally in 2018, up from $1.4B in '17
Federal Bureau of Investigation :
Context & Ripple Effects
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $2.7B in global online theft, fraud, and exploitation losses for 2018 — double the $1.4B reported for 2017 — making this report the early data point in what became a steep annual climb. Subsequent IC3 tallies show the trajectory held: $4.2B in reported losses for 2020, $6.9B for 2021, $12.5B for 2023, and nearly $21B for 2025.
What makes the 2018 baseline worth revisiting is how the composition of losses shifted along the way: the FBI's own follow-up reporting ties the later surge increasingly to investment fraud — including crypto-related schemes — business email compromise, and tech support scams, categories that barely register in the 2018 headline number.
First-order effects
- US consumers and businesses filing complaints with IC3 absorbed the direct hit, with reported global losses doubling year over year to $2.7B — a signal that victim reporting volume and per-victim severity were both rising.
Second-order effects
- The loss curve pushed the FBI into sustained enforcement work beyond annual statistics: its later operations include dismantling an AI-powered Chinese phishing operation with Google and Black Lotus Labs, seizing Tether linked to that operation, and taking down domains tied to fake consulting firms targeting government employees.
- Business email compromise emerged as the highest-value scam category in IC3's own follow-up tally — 241K+ global reports from June 2016 to July 2019 totaling $43B+ in actual and attempted losses — forcing companies to treat wire-transfer verification as a security control rather than an accounting procedure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, reported cybercrime losses compound fast enough that investment and crypto fraud become the dominant loss driver — the FBI's 2023–2025 reports attribute the largest single share of losses to investment scams, including $3.94B crypto-related in 2023 and $1.8B via investment scams against over-60s in 2024 — shifting enforcement and consumer-protection attention from hacking toward financial-scam policing.
The trend: Reported internet-crime losses have compounded roughly eightfold since this 2018 report, with the FBI's IC3 data evolving from a fraud-tracking statistic into the primary public gauge of a scam economy increasingly centered on investment and crypto schemes.