ATLANTA — The amount of money lost to cybercrime has increased dramatically in recent years, but is it outpacing the amount lost to home burglaries as one celebrity claims?
An 11Alive viewer emailed us after seeing actor Robert Downey Jr. in videos circulating on social media claiming that home burglary losses account for less than half of what is lost each year to online crimes.
Answer
Yes, based on FBI statistics it appears that losses due to cybersecurity are more than double the losses due to home burglaries.
Sources
What we found
The FBI’s latest Internet Crime Report lists the potential loss from cybercrimes in 2022 at more than $10-billion. That’s up from nearly $7-billion the year before.
Maimon points out that the FBI’s stats depend on victims reporting to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. He believes the amount is actually much higher.
“The true costs of cybercrime, online fraud, online theft, hacking, data breaches and so on, I think that nobody can tell you that at this point,” Maimon explained. “The $10.3 billion from the FBI for 2022 are, in my mind, very conservative.”
The exact amount of money lost each year in home burglaries is also difficult to nail down.
The FBI reported that burglary victims lost an estimated $3-billion dollars in 2019.
That’s based on victim reports to local police who then reported crimes to the FBI.
The FBI reports that complaints of home burglaries have been dropping steadily for more than a decade.