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Crime & Scams

Costly investment scams on the rise

Losses to investment scams rose by 38%, the FBI says.

Costly investment scams on the rise

Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Photo: Terry Wieckert/Getty Images

By
Billy Hurley
14 March 2024
less than 3 min read
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Cybercriminals are going low and scamming high.

Early 2023 reports from government, academia, and industry demonstrate an uptick in investment scams—a big-money tactic that’s difficult for victims to detect, given effective trust-building with targets and convincing designs from the fraudster.

“For an external party looking at one of these sites, there’s no really obvious indicators of why it’s fake. There’s no, like, bank logo,” Robert Duncan, VP of product strategy at cybersecurity company Netcraft, told IT Brew.


Investment fraud led the FBI’s list of “costliest” crimes in 2023, the agency said in their recently released annual Internet Crime Report; the pull from the phony money-making opps surpassed amounts earned from classic fraud schemes like business email compromise and tech-support scams.


Some facts from the FBI report:

  • Losses to investment scams rose from $3.31 billion in 2022 to $4.57 billion in 2023.

  • The age group of victims most likely to report investment-fraud losses: 30 to 49 years old.

  • Investment fraud “with a reference to cryptocurrency” increased by 53%, from $2.57 billion in 2022 to $3.94 billion in 2023. “These scams are designed to entice those targeted with the promise of lucrative returns on their investments,” the report read.

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