Monday, March 10, 2025
New FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024
The FTC added 6.5 million consumer reports to the Consumer Sentinel Network (Sentinel) secure online database in 2024, with over 118.960 reports of investment fraud schemes and 845,806 reports of imposter scams.
However, it's important to note that the data shared by the FTC reflects only a fraction of the actual harm scammers inflicted last year since the vast majority of frauds are never reported
US govt says Americans lost record $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024
March 10, 2025
03:05 PM
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said today that Americans lost a record $12.5 billion to fraud last year, a 25% increase over the previous year.
Consumers reported that investment scams resulted in the highest losses, totaling around $5.7 billion with a median loss of over $9,000 and exceeding all other fraud categories. The second largest reported loss was linked with imposter scams, amounting to $2.95 billion in 2024.
Younger people have also reported losing money to fraud more often than people over 70, as 44% of all reports filed last year came from consumers between 20 and 29.
The FTC added 6.5 million consumer reports to the Consumer Sentinel Network (Sentinel) secure online database in 2024, with over 118.960 reports of investment fraud schemes and 845,806 reports of imposter scams.
However, it's important to note that the data shared by the FTC reflects only a fraction of the actual harm scammers inflicted last year since the vast majority of frauds are never reported.
Fraud victims can file identity theft reports at IdentityTheft.gov and report incidents at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
After being included in the FTC's Sentinel database, their reports are available to approximately 2,800 federal, state, local, and international law enforcement professionals, helping fraud investigators track down scammers and making it easier to discover trends.
A full breakdown of reports received in 2024, including state and metropolitan area statistics, can be found on the FTC's data analysis site at ftc.gov/exploredata.
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The decline is attributed to warnings from Trump administration officials about the potential for a rough patch in the American economy, as well as rising concerns about a recession and trade wars.
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DAILY CYBER NEWS: Scam spoofs Binance website and uses TRUMP coin as lure for malware
Hackers are
spreading a malicious remote access tool through an email campaign that
targets people interested in buying President Donald Trump’s
cryptocurrency through the Binance platform.
(Image: gettrumpmemes.com. Remix: PhotoMosh)
Jonathan Greig
March 10th, 2025
The emails are made to look like they come from Binance — currently the largest cryptocurrency platform in the world — and offer the ability to earn TRUMP coins through various actions like installing Binance software, registering an account on the platform and depositing funds.
Trump announced the coin ahead of his inauguration in January and companies tied to the president allegedly earned millions from it, raising severe concerns of corruption by ethics experts and even cryptocurrency advocates.
Cybersecurity researchers at Cofense told Recorded Future News that they are unsure of who is behind the recent campaign, which allows the hackers to steal information from infected computers.
The researchers said that if victims follow the instructions in the email and hit the download link to get the TRUMP coins, they instead install a malicious version of a remote access tool known as ConnectWise. They added that the threat actors “are eagerly monitoring infections and can connect to infected computers in under 2 minutes.”
Max Gannon, Intelligence Manager at Cofense, said the company has seen a wide variety of threat actors abuse ConnectWise recently.
“Some campaigns have been spoofing LinkedIn, others Binance, Virtru, and even the United States Social Security Administration. Part of the reason it has likely become so popular recently is that it has a lot of features and is free to use and easy to set up,” he said.
“Moreover because it is technically legitimate there are a large number of files that it uses which cannot simply be blocked because they are also used by legitimate installations of ConnectWise RAT,” Cofense’s name for the malicious version.
The emails take multiple steps to impersonate Binance, using the name of the company in the sender’s name and even including a “risk warning” in an effort to make the emails look legitimate.
The fake website that greets victims is also painstakingly designed to look legitimate, using real images from the Binance and TRUMP coin websites.
The download link on the site downloads the installer for the malicious version of ConnectWise instead of Binance’s desktop platform.
“Shortly after checking in, the threat actor takes remote control of any infected computers. This is in contrast to most ConnectWise RAT installations where the threat actor will only decide to interact with an infected host after some time has passed,” Cofense explained.
“After a threat actor has connected, they will target saved passwords for applications such as Microsoft Edge, making up for ConnectWise RAT’s relative lack of information theft capabilities.”
Gannon said due to its simplicity, ConnectWise RAT can be used by threat actors of varying skill levels — from people who really don’t know what they are doing all the way up to advanced persistence threat (APT) groups trying to disguise their activities.
Cofense has released multiple reports this year on various phishing campaigns deploying ConnectWise RAT
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